Love is About the Narrative:
A Story of Community, Values, Media, and Jesus
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Last Wednesday, I spent three hours on the phone talking with my best friend about her relationship troubles. The conversation caused my phone to heat my cheek. She wasn’t hurting outright but was just inquisitive. Her boyfriend, whom she loved greatly, wasn’t spending enough time with her. When they were together, he felt absent, as though his mind was always wandering. She asked me if her relationship sounded like true love, and I responded that it depended upon her idea of truth.
For me, the call was procrastination at its peak, laying down in my hotel bed, flashing in-between moments of productivity and stasis. I was in Orlando to give a lecture on storytelling, and I hadn’t prepared much since I landed. Then, my best friend put me on hold for a brief instant. I had a second to catch my breath, assess, and make a choice. Once she returned, she offered to call me back in an hour. I declined.
For her, the conversation was something other than procrastination. And in the heart of meaningful dialogue, I’m always aware that something special is happening, leaving me to wonder what we’re doing when we’re having conversations. For some reason, it feels divine to be understood. Regardless of how long we do it, conversations are loaded with meaning. We take it for granted because we use speech every day, but language converts thoughts into symbols. Those symbols desire entrance into other minds, especially when someone disseminates their deep secrets, the thoughts saturated with fears.
Even a simple trip to a grocery store has the force to become an epic odyssey in the adventurer’s mind. Depends on what happens, really, and how it happens. From the window in my hotel room, I could see the pool and people were swimming while rain poured. I’ve never seen anything like it, a simple yet remarkable and exotic sight. It would be just as easy for us to live life like a vault, hushing observations or keeping our deepest sins and wildest dreams to ourselves. But, no, something within us froths forth to regale whoever might listen with dialogue, time spent to make sense of an experience as if the experiencer needs a translator to help them sift through the events of their own time here.
Our senses can barely wrap our heads around the unattainable essence of time: what it is, how to document it, how it restrains life, and whether it lives as a rudimentary building block of reality. Is it an illusion to believe that time can be spent well?
Western civilization adopted a linear vision of time, while numerous other cultures have focused on cyclical aspects. Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, embraced a theory of time that offered an eventual return of the world to its former state; nothing is permanent, and even death is a route to resurrection and renewal. But other cultures, including those in ancient Iran, Greece, and Rome, personified time as a godhead, often named Chronos. Chronos was frequently represented as a winged, three-headed serpent. The heads were a man, a bull, and a lion. The philosopher Pythagoras, in the 6th century BCE, depicted Chronos as the very soul of the universe.
Because if love is anything, it is an agreement to barter time. We are exchanging so much more, but this whole party of life is rooted in time, trying to mediate whom to spend it, along with how we remember the time spent. Colloquially, the word “spend” is linked with time. How do you spend your time? When a relationship reaches a fiery end, most pain stems from the collected memories, reflecting upon the adventure taken with a person, the good and evil, the accurate or inaccurate perceptions. You do not even have to be dating someone to feel entitled to their time in some way. But, unfortunately, more than oil and water, time is the only commodity that we understand will run out, so we trade it sacredly.
I remember once, a humid bright December evening in Orlando, suggesting to my best friend over the phone that we had been friends for so long. During the conversation, I emphasized how long we had been friends. She laughed until it sounded like she couldn’t breathe, and I sat there and listened to the wheezing, chortling myself even. Then, finally, she said, “Don’t tell me how long we’ve been friends. It makes me feel old.” But, of course, I assured her, we are getting old.
Introducing new ideas concerning love and time without sounding cheap is a challenge. Some $2 valentine’s day cards can shortchange an experience as complex as love, an experience that can include a love of friendships and relationships and places. An emotion that harbors jealousy in the same embodiment as fear, admiration, and trust. I can confidently state how we do not choose the things that interest us, let alone the people. We tend to bumble upon people and conversations without grace. Moreover, by using the illustrious magnifying glass that we call hindsight, we just might be able to attribute some divine ordinance to a happenstance occurrence, morphing every day into poetry.
How many times have you been perplexed by an event and determined that it must’ve been a sign? Or maybe you had a dream months before a tragedy, but if the right interpretative dots are connected, it has the strength to miraculously become a prophecy. There’s significance in attending to things that we don’t instantly comprehend. That wasn’t just a dream. It was a message from the great void we call the unknown, warning you about a journey you’ve yet to embark upon.
The Lewis and Clark expedition lasted from May 14th, 1804, to September 23rd, 1806. Their crew traveled over 8000 miles in two years. I can’t imagine walking for two years, let alone in utterly uncharted territory. Most people I know don’t even leave the house without plugging their destination into Apple Maps or Waze.
Every second, the crew stepped foot on new ground. They traveled anywhere between 5 and 20 miles. Surrounding them were the present and the unknown, not digitized mess in the form of non-fungible tokens and crypto. They traveled spaces where no white man had been before them, approaching savage danger without fear.
The 1955 movie The Far Horizons starred Donna Reed and introduced a romance between Sacajawea and William Clark. This Paramount Vista Vision feature film starred Donna Reed as Sacajawea, the movie’s focal point, with Fred MacMurray as Meriwether Lewis and Charlton Heston as William Clark. Directed by Rudolph Maté, the film was based on a novel by Delia Gould Emmons, Sacajawea of the Shoshones (1943) and was released at the height of the sesquicentennial of the expedition and featured photography shot along the trail.
The Criterion Theatre in New York had installed new VistaVision motion picture equipment to accommodate the film. Despite the hype, the story, the star-studded cast, and the new technology, the New York Times reviewer judged that “The Far Horizons landed at the Criterion yesterday with a hollow thud.” He continued: “Aside from nature and a consistently winning performance by Miss Reed, as the Indian guide, Sacajawea, this slow and unimaginative safari seldom suggests either history or life. In some respects, it is absurd.” And, finally: “As for Paramount’s idea of what Lewis and Clark did, was this trip necessary? Shucks, no.” It was not the only bad review the movie would receive. Two weeks later, Bosley Crowther offered this brief but brutal assessment: “The Lewis and Clark expedition to the Northwest never looked sillier.”
One of the whitest ladies of old Hollywood, Donna Reed, plays Sacajawea while smudged in brown makeup. There is no inclusion of the genocide that followed the probe of the new land either. However, in the film, Thomas Jefferson, played by Herbert Hayes, says that the “dream” in which this nation was built will never be secure until the United States stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific. However, the most delicate details of American history belong to a moment when Sacajawea says she belongs to them now because Clark and the crew had fought for her and won.
When Sacajawea says this, it furnishes a double definition. The corpus of Sacajawea becomes a broker for the macrocosmic relationship with the United States, a land that has new masters. Americans won, and the United States lives. But also, it’s about love. How we fight for what we love, assuming some kind of ownership, as if what we love belongs to us or we belong to what we love.
Over time, Sacajawea’s image matured to symbolize friendly relations between the U.S. government and the Native Americans. Ultimately, in 2000, this great nation chose to bestow Sacajawea the ultimate honor of putting her mug on a golden dollar. But, unfortunately, reckon you go to United States Mint’s website. It erroneously states that she guided Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their coalition from the Northern Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean and back.
Most of what we know about Sacajawea is in the expedition journals and is very meager material to build a mythos. The United States Mint’s website also states that Sacajawea lived until 1880 when all records pointed to her dying in 1812.
The true story goes, in April 1803, Thomas Jefferson satisfied his goal of purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France, effectively doubling the size of the United States. The acquisition was attainable due to circumstances beyond this nation’s control. With the triumph of the Haitian Revolution, an uprising of enslaved people against the French, France’s Napoleon ditched his quest to re-establish an expansive French Empire in America.
France constructed a network of colonies in the Americas, selling coffee, indigo, and other commodities to Europeans. Nevertheless, none held a candle to sugar, which dominated French colonial holdings. Furthermore, St. Domingue, which is now known as Haiti, was one of the great sugar hubs of the globe. Forty percent of Britain and France’s sugar, and sixty percent of its coffee, was produced in Haiti, and the lucrative demand creative a ruthless brand of slavery.
Lewis and Clark were recruited by President Thomas Jefferson himself to scour the upper reaches of the Missouri River. This water link would connect the Pacific Ocean with the Mississippi River system, thus giving the new western land access to port markets out of the Gulf of Mexico and to eastern cities along the Ohio River and its minor tributaries.
Jefferson wanted to improve the ability of American merchants to access the ports of China. In addition, establishing a river route from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean was crucial to capturing a portion of the fur trade that proved so profitable to Great Britain. He also wanted to legitimize American claims to the land against rivals, such as Great Britain and Spain.
The two adventurers worked their way up the Missouri River and then stopped for the winter to build a fort near present-day North Dakota, where they met a pregnant teenager named Sacajawea. Interestingly enough, they met her through her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau. He was a French fur trader who purchased Sacajawea from members of another tribe who captured her, so it might even be historically imprudent to call him “husband” and her “wife.”
Again, the only facts we know about Sacajawea come from Lewis and Clark’s logbooks. She did not translate for the group or guide them according to these entries. She was only with them because Charbonneau got hired to translate for the expedition crew and became indispensable in that capacity. Nevertheless, she recognized some geographic structures when the team reached her homeland in southwestern Montana.
In addition, her newborn baby calmed fears from other Indians that their party was on a war mission. Beyond this conception, she may have been a pleasant companion, and her child, Jean Baptiste, presumably brought the men joy.
Adventures transform the adventurer. Regardless of what it is or where you’re going, it’s impossible to remain unchanged by what we experience.
I wasn’t in Orlando too long. About a week, but the state changed me pretty quickly. I know. I do not colloquially mean changed either. I mean that I was changed by the city of Orlando for what it could represent, the same feeling you get when you see a beautiful woman that you know you’ll never see again, so she becomes a figment of your imagination, a deep creation of an ideal.
In that case, she remains perfect, minted in your memory because you encased her unchangeable self, and you also rationalized that talking to her would create room for error. But just the simple thought of her at all has changed you, your desires, and your fears.
She becomes the unknown, and we can only grow for the better if we encounter the unknown’s endless potentialities. So, no, it would be best if you left her be. And if you do that, you can commit to loving her better in your imagination because you guys did not sully each other with your imperfections.
In Orlando, I remember walking down International avenue. I was late for a date, but I stopped to buy a mango from a Cuban guy selling them out of a cart. I sat on a nearby bench to eat it, tasting the mango and feeling the humid wind graze across my lips. I could smell daffodils mixing with my cologne.
While sitting on the bench, a couple of reflections ran through my mind, consumed like mango chunks. Primarily, love seems like a game with fluid but arbitrary rules. But, maybe the muscle we use to love is shared with the one we use to remain spirited in our careers, chasing dreams. In pursuing love, you can evolve into anyone you want to be or digress into someone you’d never imagined.
If I desired, I could move to Rendville, Ohio, get a job at a local paper, and change my name to “Pedro Johnson,” or head up to Miami and be a scammer or be a pimp or pastor. Depending on what you love or whom you love, an entire life can change. How you love opens up a schism in the universe, presenting opportunities to rewrite the natural narrative of your destiny.
The Gospel of John repeatedly refers to the disciple whom Jesus loved. Most readers think that disciple was John. However, another disciple was just as close, if not closer, to Jesus. Mary Magdalene remained close to him, journeyed with him everywhere, listened to his instructions, and even helped support him financially. She stood at the foot of the cross as he died and was the first to see the resurrected Lord.
Mary was one of three women whom Jesus had healed of the wickedness of their minds. He had cast seven demons out of Mary, but this did not imply she was immoral. Instead, I imagine Jesus as a psychologist or a good listener, the demons being a product of some trauma. For some reason, historians represent Mary as a prostitute, though there are no facts to substantiate that. The label was attached to her centuries later, perhaps because her hometown, Magdala, had a reputation for whoring.
The Gospel of John depicts Mary going to Jesus’s tomb just before dawn, seeing that the stone blocking the tomb’s entrance has been rolled backward. In a panic, she then runs back to the city and tells Peter and John, “Yo, someone stole Jesus’s body from the tomb, fam.” The disciples dash to the crypt and find Jesus’s body missing, but his burial garments remain in the tomb.
The disciples return home, and Mary remains near the tomb in tears. Then, two angels materialize before her and ask her why she’s crying. Mary tells them why, and in a blink of an eye, Jesus appears again, but initially, she does not recognize him, misperceiving him for the gardener. Only when Jesus softly speaks her name does Mary realize she sees the resurrected Christ. Jesus instructs her to tell the other disciples what she has seen, and off she dashes off again.
I n Christianity’s premature years, Mary Magdalene emerged as an influential figure and the epicenter of a fuss over the role of women in the church. Even some contemporary historical analysis appears tarnished with the subliminal. Mary Magdalene is the madwoman in Christianity’s attic. She was concealed there because of an open and not fully appreciated mystery. Its imports, at Christianity’s soul: that the male disciples didn’t fully absorb His teachings and Mary did.
Much of what we understand of her comes from a book entitled the Gospel of Mary, probably penned in the late first or early second century. Long lost, the book now survives in fragments. The surviving text begins as Jesus is guiding his disciples, including Mary, that redemption comes from seeking the true spiritual nature of existence within the individual.
When Jesus died, the disciples had not fully understood what Jesus was trying to teach them, save for Matthew and Mary. So rather than seek peace within, every other disciple concerns themselves with Jesus’s departure and fears their own mortality.
Mary begins to console them, giving them additional teachings, performing as the substitute for Christ. She shares a vision in which the departed Christ told her how to win battles over worldly powers that keep the soul ignorant of its spiritual nature. Anyhow, Peter and Andrew continue to deny Mary’s gospel because they are offended that Jesus selected a woman to lead over them. Finally, in the middle of their doubt, Matthew tells Peter, “If the Savior considered her to be worthy, who are you to disregard her? For he knew her completely and loved her devotedly.”
The most provocative statement about Mary Magdalene is in the Gospel of Phillip. One of the brief entries in this so-called gospel states that the Lord loved Mary Magdalene more than all the disciples, and he used to kiss her on the mouth more than the others, angering them. The male disciples seem to be suffering from a bit of sibling rivalry. Nonetheless, these situations reflect the notion of potential resentment where a woman is taking on the role of a spiritual leader.
I n the novel The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown made a big deal about the passage where Jesus kisses Mary Magdalene, asserting that Jesus and Mary were married, and she was pregnant at the Crucifixion. Magdalene later fled to France, known as Gaul, to bear his child. Therefore, Magdalene is the Holy Grail, rather than some senseless chalice, because she harbored the royal bloodline. According to Brown’s thesis, the Catholic Church has spent the last 2,000 years trying to cover up these facts to diminish the function of women in the early church — “the lost sacred feminine” — and reject that the bloodline still lives.
But of course, The Da Vinci Code is fiction, and it can even be argued that sections of the Bible are as well, so either needn’t be rational or even reasonable. For example, Brown could depict Mary floating everywhere on a hoverboard if he thought it would sell. However, in all seriousness, a more divine and practical take on the kiss is that it symbolized a transmission of spiritual knowledge, which the disciples felt they were more entitled to than a former whore.
In fact, films have a powerful effect on memory. Films seem harmless, so viewers overlook biases, ideological assumptions, and other implications crafted into narratives by creators. They pose unique problems for remembering because they appeal to emotions in ways that have profound results on both individual and public memory.
Movies appear to invoke the emotional certitude we associate with memory. Just like a memory, movies are associated with the body, engaging with the viewer on a somatic level, immersing the spectator in experiences and impressions that, like memories, seem to be burned into the viewer as genuine.
Memories are shared to convey facts about what happened, constructed to mean something. This draw to have our experiences mean something makes remembering practices powerless to ideological forces, subjective truths.
Remembering is communal. The interests of a given community can easily dictate narrative frameworks, transforming memory-making into definitive statements representative of that community, such as the church or any oppressed group. Moreover, these communal recollections embody themselves and only themselves, able to be experienced in dialogue or media, forging a relationship between the past and the future.
Possessing a memory unifies the individual into the collective, underscoring the inevitability in which memories achieve meaning and become available to be agreed upon or discredited. Humans create memorials, statues, archives, books, films, and even tattoos to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct memories.
For that reason, it is imperative to interrogate how we remember and for what purpose. I’ve often wondered if society will recognize the importance of tradition, but now I hope we will not forget love in the future. Love is the hope that all things flourish. In the Bible, our ancestors used the love of God to articulate the nature of love itself, giving love a divine, transcendent principle. 1 John 4:7–8 says, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” By attributing love’s source to God, they learned to love something without expecting anything in return, removing attachment from an exchange of hopes.
Loving God operates on the presupposition that you must know that the object of your passion cherishes you, whether or not you see the return manifested in every given moment. Allowing for the possibility of love’s boon, yet not to despair the boon’s absence.
The hunt to love something has nearly coopted religion’s position in society, turning dating into the new church with less meaningful unions and more wastes of time. There’s an aspirational quality to love because, if love is a transcendent principle like the Bible says — the societal inundation of true love, through cinema and media in general, plays its part in bringing courtship and love down to the mundane. Still, beyond pain and suffering, terror and confusion, reality’s most dominant characteristic is the capacity to experience a meaningful bond. Whether or not we’re alive to attain true love is questionable
The universe manifests love in the masculine expressions of rules, logic, rigidity, tradition, culture, and feminine expressions of openness, intuition, nature, change, and fluidity. When embarking upon love’s journey, these two expressions jostle for supremacy, making finding an adequate representation of love an inherently divine enterprise. Nothing is easy about love because it’s intertwining opposites.
If an individual is only a means for obtaining pleasure and is not a divine enterprise, then the wrong choice is always expected. But, on the other hand, maybe it’s too much to ask for relationships. In our current state of selfishness, love might be a dull meditation, a very distant state of affairs where the participants hide their true character while being restrained by traditional customs, making the traditions irrelevant.
The thing that makes the story of Jesus one of the greatest ever written is because it serves us as both literal and allegory. I prefer the symbolic, where the Son of Man is used to explain the birth of true consciousness. From that extended lens, what does not get spoken about much is his last breath on the cross, where he cries out to God, his Father, asking, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” which translates to, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” The divine Son utters a statement of doubt toward his Father, presenting a rather a human response to suffering.
Doubt. Even Jesus Christ doubted whether or not his Father truly loved him, so we have no chance! I’m kidding. But maybe a universal truism about the nature of love is that though the potential for happiness exists within it, we can define love by its potential for pain and suffering, as well.
Feeling forsaken by someone who loves us is expected, abandonment chronicling the story of love. Perishing before your partner is an unspoken covenant you’ve entered once you decide to love someone. So naturally, entering into love comes with the potential for abandonment somehow. That’s the bargain because how we remember our time together is more important than the time itself.
Consciousness can’t construct reality entirely alone, values coming from the soup of shared experience. So, first, we need to figure out what the individual within us values, and ironically, the idea of the individual starts with a division. Journeying into someone else means traveling into yourself, but often when we think about love, it’s discussed as a portal to receive sex and cuddles, but there’s more to it beneath the surface. There’s a whole journey.
Love has something like three components: a love of self, the other person, and a love of the connection between you and your partner. Ironically, in a society that increasingly loves to praise love, we grow in anti-social behavior, narcissism, and sociopathy. Traits that I think are anti-love. We do not like sharing in this new society. The fantasy we are afraid to say is over, is over. As a result, love’s center, whatever we can agree that it is, cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear Saint Valentine.
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