The fruit of the Spirit is...love

Letters for the Road: February 2025

Feb 14, 2025

We are in a time of transition here, having made the move from Australia back to the U.S. in December. Times of transition prove difficult even for established habits, and I’m afraid writing these letters is not the established habit that I would like it to be. So, as I’ve been thinking about the upcoming year and my writing plans, I want to help make these more regular than they have been in the past year. One writing difficulty that I routinely face is choosing a topic: what should I write about that will be valuable to my readers, and about which I can write thoughtfully?

One way to overcome this difficulty is to have a set topic, to lessen the decision-making load each month (which often proves paralysing!). My children are memorising part of Galatians 5, including the verses on the fruit of the Spirit–and it occurred to me to take a fruit in turn for reflection. Fruitfulness was the topic of my final chapter of my doctoral thesis, and I wrote briefly about women and fruitfulness on my blog a few weeks ago. It seems fitting, then, to think about specific fruit this year, particularly when–at least in the U.S.--political expediency seems to be the value that surpasses the fruit of the Spirit.

And so, here we are at the first of the fruits: love. And today is Valentine’s Day. I hope this month’s, and this year’s, letters prove fruitful for your own thinking and living on this road of the Christian life.

Dear reader,

Given Scripture’s declaration that “God is love,” it is not difficult to understand why Paul names love as the first fruit of the Spirit. If we are to be image bearers of God, we must start with love–otherwise, as John tells us, the world will not know that we belong to God. Love as the first fruit of the Spirit also fits with what theologians have traditionally said about the Holy Spirit: that the Spirit is the bond of love between Father and Son. Bonaventure writes that the Spirit, “who is Love and is possessed by love, is the source of all spiritual gifts.” At Pentecost, through his descent, he pours out “the fullness of these gifts...in order to bring the mystical body of Christ to perfection.”

There is a sense in which Scripture presents love as straightforward. And yet, it feels as though the nature of love has become both highly contested, and also bland from the assumption that we know what it means.

This week, we have seen the nature of love contested in the political sphere, as U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance has invoked Augustine’s ordering of love–loving one’s family, then nation, and then those far away. We have our own version of this in Evangelical circles: God first, others second, me last. Our self-care culture reverses this list, with a similar idea: love and care for yourself first, before you spend yourself on others. In all three, there is the possibility for tension: loving one’s family or nation can preclude love for the foreigner; loving one’s self might limit your love for others; loving God means that love for yourself takes a backseat.

This tension develops from the practical realities of time and money, because of course when we give our time or money or energy to one thing…there is less of it for another. Finite resources are a function of our creaturely limitations, and we live faithfully not by ignoring our limits but by embracing them.

In Dickens’ classic Bleak House, his character Mrs. Jellyby is infamous for her single-minded devotion to mission work in Africa, all the while neglecting the care of her own home, including her husband and children. Dickens describes her work as “telescopic philanthropy,” and her eyes as having “a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if…they could see nothing nearer than Africa!” He particularly critiques her character through her oldest daughter, Caddy. In her misery, Caddy proclaims that she despises Africa and “causes.”

The tension between one’s one and strangers arises in another, more recent novel–Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. The main character, Bill Furlong, is confronted with injustice. He has the opportunity to ignore it—the abuse he suspects is behind the walls of a convent, and does not affect his own family or community, directly. Even more, to confront the injustice will jeopardise the educational opportunities of his own daughters. To help a stranger means risking their futures.

In both of these examples, love for the other affects love for one’s own. One interpretation of Dickens’ characters admonishes Christians to be wary of causes of justice, and to instead commit themselves—women in particular–to the care of their children and home. Yet, Dickens’ own life makes this interpretation suspect: Dickens’ novels are full of social critique, not only of individual characters such as Mrs. Jellyby, but of the social conditions and systems that perpetuated injustice in Victorian England. Outside of his novels, he campaigned for reform, especially in areas involving children.

In Bill Furlong’s case, it is clear that the risk to his own daughters is one that he must take, for the sake of his own integrity. The fallout remains outside of the scope of the novel, intensifying the weightiness of Bill’s decision: he has no guarantee that it will all turn out well just because he has chosen to love the stranger.

I wonder if we lack this guarantee, as well. The assurance that the Widow of Zarepath receives—that her oil will not run dry and her flour will not be used up until the drought ends—is not an assurance that most people receive when they feed the foreigner at the risk of not feeding themselves and their children. And yet, in encouraging the Corinthians, Paul proclaims that “God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work” (2 Corinthians 9:8).

It is the abundance of God that makes me question the assumption that in its practical expression, love for one is in competition with love for another. Must my love for my children compete with my love for the stranger? Must my love for my neighbour compete with my love for myself?

Perhaps Bill’s love for the convent girls is not actually in competition with his love for his daughters, but is an expression of that love.

Perhaps Mrs. Jellyby’s failure is that she is loving neither Africa nor her family, not that she is loving the former at the expense of the latter.

Bernard of Clairvaux speaks of the expansiveness of the “kingdom of love.” When the soul grows, he says, it is not congested with sin, but is “roomy enough for God,” a roominess that can then embrace enemies as well as friends. One who has loved their enemies has a “width, height and beauty of...soul” that is “the width, height and beauty of heaven itself.”

Love, I want to say, when it is truly the fruit of the Spirit, brings with it an expansiveness that resists the calculating, stingy, even outwardly-prudent ways that the world carefully measures out its resources.

I’m conscious of becoming idealistic here, of staying in the realm of the abstract such that all things are possible, but actually become intractable in the “real world.” And “transposing the neighbour love Christ commands us into the world of politics and policy is never easy.” We can declare that no one is outside the scope of our love–but we do need to recognise our finitude in the decisions we make. And yet I do think we need to resist a mindset of scarcity, competition, and fear. What would we be free to do if we saw our love for family, neighbour, community, and stranger, as intertwined responsibilities rather than competing ones?

Letters for the Road

The fruit of the Spirit is...love

Letters for the Road: February 2025

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