Now the deepest emptiness, I would like to propose, has to do with the mystery of love. But the first thing that we North Americans need to be reminded of, is this idiocy which holds that love is a feeling. Love is not a feeling. To call love a feeling is the same as mistaking the shadow for the reality that casts the shadow. Feelings accompany every response that we have to anything. So to say that love is a feeling is to empty it of all substance, meaning, possibility of being talked about or thought about.

And now I would like to make a proposal, which I think clarifies why love is so problematic for us human beings. It is very simple; I believe that all of us, at very deep parts of our lives, believe that we are unlovable, at a level that we do not recognize, acknowledge, address or think about. If every one of us looked at our past¼ .. , whose parents loved them perfectly? Whose parents did not, to some extent, induce a sense of shame, unworthiness, or at least confusion about who we are. And all of those possibilities work themselves out in this terrible suspicion that we have, that we really are not lovable. Yet, there is nothing we need so much to live, as to believe that we are loved. So there is the problem. We can’t live without love. And yet, we believe that we do not deserve to be loved. And I think that this is what gives rise to all of those profound distortions that go by the name of love, and that are so characteristic of us. Often that often enough when we say or hear it said to us, "I love you", what we are saying is "I need you". I hope to show that this is an inadequate way of understanding what love is about and that it creates enormous problems. It gives rise to love disguised, as a desire to control, to manipulate, which is true of all of us. Then there is the desire to compete, as if love were some exhaustible quantum, so that if I don’t get to the trough fast enough, I will lose out. And so what goes by the name of love is, often enough, a race to see who is going to get love first. Probably the most obvious distorted form is love as a desire to possess – literally possess the beloved. Above all, if we could manage it, to possess the freedom of another human being. If we look at all of this, and try to filter it through our own experience of people saying that they love us, and our saying that we love them, it accounts for the peculiar fact that love creates more misery than anything else in our lives: what we rightly call heartbreak. And so, it is not surprising that such a great Christian like Dostoyevsky would speak of love as "that harsh and dreadful thing". Because real love demands that we look through all these artificial forms, all these degenerate, distorted forms that we say are love but really are not. It is to see that they really are an expression of neediness growing, out of the basic sense that we do not deserve to be loved.

And so if we talk about emptiness here is where all the ambiguity of emptiness comes into fullest play. Because if, at any moment, we do feel that we can control, or successfully compete, successfully control the other, then emptiness seems to dissipate. But that has no duration, of course. Those moments are fleeting at best, no matter how deep our desire to have them last forever. And so Christmas, is a great celebration of emptiness in that it clarifies all of these distorted, disguised, camouflaged, substitutes for love. For what goes by the name of love is, at least in my case, and for an inordinately a large percentage of the time – an expression of need. I need an audience, I need someone to say that I am important. I need someone to reassure me that I am not worthless. I need to stand on a stage and be noticed. And how much of our loving consists of that effort; or other pathological forms, whereby we become infinite appetites for what seems to be love. We become two legged black holes, which absorb all of the attention and all of the concern that we can somehow garner for ourselves.

Is this is a dismal and artificially darkened picture of the human condition? Not in my experience. Perhaps, in yours, it might be. Yet I would still propose that these are issues well worth thinking about. Because unless we recognize this we cannot talk about Christmas, which says that love is basically the total concern for the other, independent of what benefits I may accrue from the other. But simply the other. Love that we talk about at Christmas is a gift. And gifts are very difficult to give and receive because of our belief in our unlovability. It is a wonderful statement of our profound incapacity to get hold of this, when we talk about gifts. Free gifts. Is there any gift that is real that is not free?

What the gift of the birth of Jesus brings us is a whole new possibility - that we are loved despite ourselves. That love really is a gift. And because of it I can truly love, to the extent that I grow up, transcend my own neediness. So I can really attend wholly to the other - charity without a hook. Christmas reveals the most mysterious, profound, yet necessary form of love – the only form of love.

So to prepare for Christmas, and in this context we can talk about a baptism today. What happens when somebody gets baptized, unless it is just sheer convention, something that everybody does? On the part of the parents and the godparents and the rest of us, baptism is recognition that these children are gifts to us, given to us. In a very real sense, they are not ours. Again, the passion to possess is broken by our statement that this child is going to be baptized, is going to be reborn in God. And so it is very important that we, the parents and godparents, know what they are doing and that the rest of us know that this child is entrusted to all of us, as with so many kids in this room who have been baptized. They are ours. They don’t belong to the parent, they belong to God. And it is our job and the parent’s job to somehow persuade that child that they really are lovable by God, not just by us, who so often use our children to possess, to control, to compete with, to draw attention to ourselves - none of that. In other words, baptism is the great act of faith that we cannot love well enough, but that God can. And it is an act of freedom, freedom from the neurotic hope that we all have, that any can supply all the love we need. We can’t and the empirical evidence that we don’t is overwhelming, it is available to anyone who wants to introspect for more than five minutes.