Tolerance and Love

Tolerance is among our most dangerous words. Dangerous because it calls for a selfish, banal, subtle sort of isolationism. When we are tolerant we essentially say, in our most feigned tone of polite interest, “Oh, how nice!” to other human beings’ entire lives – their very existence. Tolerance is a means of self-protection, a pitiful appeal to the laws of reciprocation – if everything else has been declared ok, then certainly we are. Intolerance is so intolerable to us, less because it is “ignorant” or hateful than because it is a sort of turbulence in the stale air that separates each of us – scabby and raw – from painful contact with another. By becoming open and accepting of everything we avoid engaging with anything, and, we hope, deter anything from engaging with us. It is the foundation for a new kind of individualism in which we are not isolated from one another by a vision of independence and personal strength – no, “community” is the beloved word of the “post-modern” age – but by a foam of triviality. In a desperate bid to be accepted unconditionally we, ourselves, accept patchy costumes as complete, truthful representations of people – real people, with bitter disappointments and incredible transcendences – and in doing it, put ourselves so much further away from anything resembling an actual relational encounter.

Love is just the opposite. Love never tolerates – it embraces. Embraces until there is total contact; violent friction. Clings – wrestles – until lover and beloved are bloody and weeping and exposed from the anguish of their entwinement. If we are not wincing, we are not loving. And love transforms. We are, none of us, “ok” when there is love – we are all becoming – painfully healing – enlarging. When there is tolerance we fester. When there is love, we live.

It is never enough, for love, that anyone stand aside and tell another they are right, that they’re accepted – nor that they’re wrong, that they have failed. Neither amounts to contact. “Acceptance”, “rejection” – these have become distant words; for shouting across an interpersonal gulf; costless to the speaker. But when two people touch, both will feel it; both shapes will change to conform to the other. When all we do is tell we meet each other in imagined times and places – the past and the future, over there or over there. But when we touch there is realization, actuality – it is now, and here. God dwells in those realities – because God, himself, is real. And where God is, life is.

We have not invented “tolerance” to assuage our terror of hatred and bigotry – in our recently imagination-less West, such extremities scarcely exist. We scream “tolerance” because we fear love, which asks more of us than outright war – cml.