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New Series: "Works of Love"

This is Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is cool.
So I'm starting a new blog project. The basis for this project is a recurring problem I’ve experienced as a Kierkegaard aficionado: I find him to be utterly fascinating and constantly relevant to my life as an American Christian in 2015, and yet I have a difficult time sharing Kierkegaard with other American Christians in 2015. For instance, Fridays are my day to read a devotion at the morning staff meeting. For a long time I’ve wanted to use Kierkegaard as a source, but there are no Kierkegaard devotionals. I decided to just start picking out passages, but I found it very difficult to find passages of his writings that were short enough and could stand by themselves as a complete thought. Even when I did, those passages were often incredibly dense (as is Kierkegaard’s style) and difficult to digest.

This project is the solution to that challenge. I’ve decided to take a single work of Kierkegaard’s—Works of Love, published in 1847—and go through each chapter, taking out my favorite parts and adding some clarifying thoughts of my own in a devotional format. I chose Works of Love because I haven’t actually read it yet, and it is a subject on which I could stand to learn a lot. The musings and prayers are genuine—they reflect me honest personal struggle with the command Christ has given us that we shall love—and I hope that this project will be helpful to someone, whether they learn something new about Christian love or become more interested in Kierkegaard. On that note, let me say: if you find anything in these posts that is compelling, inspiring, true, lovely—it comes from Kierkegaard, and I recommend that you pick up the book yourself and read it through. Here’s a picture of the translation I’ve used, which I find to be the most accessible:

Unfortunately, as I look back on the history of my blog I noticed several projects that I’ve started and never finished. For that reason I waited until I had finished all of Part One (of two) before publishing the first entry. That means you are guaranteed nine entries. I hope to continue straight on into Part Two, but at this point I can only promise the first part.

Well, that’s all there is to say. Let me close with the opening prayer to Kierkegaard’s Works of Love:
“How could love be rightly discussed if You were forgotten, O God of Love, source of all love in heaven and on earth, You who spared nothing by gave all in love, You who are Love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you! How could love properly be discussed if you were forgotten, You who made manifest what love is, You, our Savior and Redeemer, who gave yourself to save all! How could love be rightly discussed if You were forgotten, O Spirit of Love, You who take nothing for Your own but remind us of that sacrifice of love, remind the believer to love as he is loved, and his neighbor as himself! O Eternal Love, You who are everywhere present and never without witness wherever you are called upon be not without witness in what is said here about love or about the works of love. There are only a few acts which human language specifically and narrowly calls works of love, but heaven is such that no act can be pleasing there unless it is an act of love—sincere in self-renunciation, impelled by love itself, and for this very reason claiming no compensation.”[1]
Amen.




[1] Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love. Harper Perennial, 2009, p. xxix.
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