A Higher Love

As I watched part of an episode of a new T.V. drama recently, I heard in the background a beautiful and much slower rendition of a song that I vividly remember dancing around to when I was in high school—“Higher Love.” British musician Steve Winwood sang the song, with Chaka Khan in the background (super cool). When I heard that slower rendition this month, I found myself absorbing the words of the song; as a teenager, all I remember thinking about was the beat of it. And as my soul tasted the lyrics for the very first time, this pop favorite from my past began to feel like a hymn to me—like an actual worship song.

So, I then had to do some Google searches to find out what was said about this song when it was released back in 1986. The song was written by Winwood and Will Jennings. And it seems that, assuming what I read online is accurate, Jennings’ great grandfather was a Methodist circuit rider preacher and that old hymns inspired at least some of his songwriting—and in one quote I discovered Jennings actually referred to “Higher Love” as a modern hymn. I’m not sure why it has taken me more than thirty years to see the profundity of this song (probably because back then I was focused on a different type of love, a passionate yet ever-changing one, one much-sought after but never really found). I was looking for that love I’d read about in cheap romance novels and that I’d seen play out on the big screen in one rom com after another since our dear father had first allowed a VCR in our house; I wanted that “higher” love.

But now, finally, I can see that every single moment of what we call love here was a road sign of sorts or a type of wind current directing me elsewhere, sometimes gently and other times most painfully—directing me to that higher Love. And as I think about Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Resurrection Sunday and all that we call Easter, I think that this time of year really is the season of Higher Love—the highest love we can ever know.

I believe most people spend their lives down here looking for a perfect love, even if they don’t ever say that’s what they’re doing. It appears to be in our nature to want such love, to need it, to never be able to feel fully alive and complete apart from it. And this timeless season of selfless sacrifice and resounding resurrection gives us just that—it tells us that even in our least lovable moments, even in times when we feel as if we have nothing good at all to offer up, even in those instances in which we sense within ourselves a deep unworthiness, God sees us as worth dying for. It’s hard to fathom such a love, but that does not mean for one second it’s not true. As the adage goes, truth is stranger than fiction—and such a Love seems quite strange to us indeed. And yes, it seems higher, higher than our thoughts, our standards, our ways—and it seems so because it surely is.

“A yearning and it’s real to me

There must be someone who’s feeling for me.

Bring me a higher love…..”  

      (lyrics by: Winwood and Jennings)