SOUL FOOD:

There’s an imam I think about every year just before Valentine’s Day. I interviewed the man a few months after Sept. 11, 2001.

As we talked, he studied me so intently I began to feel uncomfortable. In time, he interrupted our exchange of questions and answers to tell me that he had figured out who I was.

He recognized me from the photo that accompanied a story he’d clipped from the newspaper to use in his ESL class. When he’d agreed to the interview, he had not made the connection. Now, seated across a table from me, he did.

His assignment was to find a story that in some way moved him. Then in his own words, in English, he was to explain to his class what the story was about and why it touched him.

The imam selected a column I wrote that year for Valentine’s Day. He liked what it said about my marriage and the nature of love. It ran counter to what he saw in our culture.

I had written about how my husband continually teaches me — by actions and not words — that love is about choosing not to be selfish.

He’s generous with praise and affection. He shares well. Our days together — not only Valentine’s Day but every day between one Valentine’s Day and the next — begin and end with him asking me, “Have I told you lately how much I love you?”

I confessed that he is better at love than I am. He always has been.

But as I wrote in that column seven years ago, when my husband married me nearly 25 years ago, he gave me the gift of a lifetime in which to get better at it. Until death do us part, I know he’s not going anywhere.

Our culture gives us foolish proverbs like “love is never having to say you’re sorry.” Popular wisdom encourages us to put our desires first and foremost.

If our spouse isn’t meeting our every whim, it’s our right to pack up and leave. We’ve coined terms like serial monogamy and no-fault divorce to describe our habits.

Never mind what they cost our family or society. The imam who was learning our language and becoming familiar with our ways was pleased to find in my column a view of love more like his own.

I thought of him a little earlier than usual this year. Our encounter came to mind as I listened to President Obama’s inaugural address.

Though neither of us were Christians when we married, my husband’s understanding of love is set forth best in 1 Corinthians 13. And 1 Corinthians 13 is the chapter, it would seem, from which our new president drew his imperative, “the time has come to set aside childish things.”

When Obama said, “We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things,” surely anyone familiar with the New Testament and St. Paul’s letter to the Christians in Corinth thought of 1 Corinthians 13.

I’m more than a little cynical about the use of Scripture in political speeches, I must say. By and large, it’s more often abused than used for our good.

It was hard to forgive Bill Clinton, for example, after he rewrote the words of 1 Corinthians 2:9 for his 1992 acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. He said, “As the Scripture says, our eyes have not yet seen, nor our ears heard nor our minds imagined what we can build.”

But what 1 Corinthians 2:9 really says is this: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” The meanings are worlds apart. It took great hubris for Clinton to call his words Scripture. It was beyond me to ever quite trust him again.

Obama alluded to 1 Corinthians 13:11 more than he quoted it. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things,” is the full text.

I could not help but wonder if Obama is counting on us to know what comes before and what come after that sentence from which he borrowed a few words. The passage is famous.

Verses 4-8 are often read at weddings. They are engraved on plaques and penned in calligraphy to be given as wedding gifts.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

Verse 13 concludes, “Now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Not an effortless, fleeting love. Not a love that never has to say “I’m sorry.”

It is the love that made C.K. Chesterton remark, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

It is the love God has for us all. It’s the love he means for us to emulate, the love he means for us to extend to one another.

Is that what Obama meant, too? I wish I knew. But in a way it really doesn’t matter. What matters is whether this is what we want.

The teaching is Christian but there is something universal at its core. It is the only way we can really hope to become “a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity,” as our president envisioned in his inaugural address.

With or without Obama, we can choose to practice the love of 1 Corinthians 13 on Valentine’s Day and every other day of the year. That could take us beyond change to transformation. God’s promise is, this love never fails.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].