Love and Consumption

"This one started with the guitar hook I came up with during sound-check; however, most of the song took shape in a hotel room in Australia. I was thinking about how love (not just lust or codependency that commonly flood the tunes on the airways) actually involves quite a bit of faith. There's a lot of letting go involved. Two souls in love is an intricate dance of give and take. I can be a fairly solitary person from time to time. Sure, I love being with people, but I also need time alone. I guess I thrive on the poles. So this song is about the dance involved in a relationship the coming together and letting go. The song equates love with breathing- pulling in and releasing. Or a seed, for the seed to grow it has to be dropped and buried.

In our barcode media, love is often portrayed as consumption. As consumers in a commercial driven culture we can begin to view other souls as objects, or potential cures for our deepest fears and insecurities. "Perhaps if I found the right lover I would no longer feel this deep existential despair." But of course no human soul could be the Constant Other, the face that will never go away. Only the infinite can fill that role. But the silence can be deafening. It's a fearful thing to be alone. Do you love me enough to let me go? "I can't live without you"- "I would die if you ever left me"- These are not the songs of love, these are the songs of consumption."

- Jon Foreman

I am simply amazed by this song. I've listened to it a few times already, along with the rest of the CD, and I really am just blown away. Probably most incredible about this CD is the revelation that Jon Foreman has discovered. In reading his description of one of his songs, Enough to Let Me Go, I realized exactly the power and truth in his words. Love in life is not to satisfy another. It is to satisfy our own cravings.

"I don't want to be alone."

"I'm afraid I'll never find anyone."

"Is there really someone out there for me?"

We want to be accepted. We want to be needed. We want to feel loved. If you stop to look around in a while, you start to realize exactly how much loneliness there is in the world. Everyone is reaching out, trying to connect with someone else. In most cases, it is not some ignorable crave to touch the life of someone else. Rather, it is to satisfy our own insecurities, our own lusts... to quench our total and inescapable loneliness. Sometimes the devil needs no horrible act or malicious instant that wrecks our lives. Sometimes, he simply convinces us that we have no one. We have nothing. We are totally and completely alone in the world.

I've been realizing more and more the love of God. I've been aware of it for years, but as I've been faced with total loneliness, I've found myself in the presence of One who loves me completely. I cannot help but realize the weight of God's love.

Really, this song, as Foreman puts it, is a reflection of trust and faith. It is an image of a dance, as he puts it, in which the good and bad intertwine in a beautiful display of human depravity and God's grace. I've discovered that everything in life, the challenges that we face, can be such a reflection of our relationship with God. Contrary to our world's model, God's love for us is not for the mere benefit of Himself. It is not to satisfy an cosmic desire to be needed. Love's motive is simply to love. Do I do what I do simply to get a response back that will squelch my inner turmoil of needing value? Or do I give myself because I simply want to show love? Are my words words of love, or are they of consumption?