I Can't Make You Love Me

Dave Brisbin | 10.30.11 Driving home from northern California through the endless San Joaquin Valley, radio stations fade in and out as we drive through their broadcast ranges. Scanning for the next signal, I hit on a clear channel just as a song I haven't heard in years is starting...turn down the lights, turn down the bed, turn down these voices inside my head... Her voice brings long dormant memories flooding back with the music, and by the time she gets to the chorus: I can't make you love me if you don't; I can't make your heart feel something it won't--I'm fully involved. The uncanny thought strikes that this song, passionately about unrequited romantic love, could so easily be sung by God to each one of us. Our relationship with God, though obviously not sexual, has always been portrayed in intimately human terms. There's the prophet Hosea, told to take an unfaithful woman for a bride as extended metaphor for the tenuous relationship between God and Israel--God and us. Did God personally risk anything by creating us with the capacity to refuse his love? Can his heart break like ours do when we sing, I will lay down my heart, and I'll feel the power--but you won't, no you won't...? Maybe God could make us love him, but maybe he won't, because if he did, we would no longer be us, and love would no longer be love: deprived of the one thing both need to be what they are...a choice freely made.