Is Love Weakness? The Upside-Down Power of Love in ‘Wild Reverence’

“Asking questions about mortals is a weakness?” “Feeling for them is,” he corrected.

Is love weakness?

Countless villains in fiction and history have thought so. Wild Reverence explores this very theme through the eyes of Matilda, a young goddess who learns the weaknesses of love at a young age. She loves a young mortal boy, but then experiences great trauma that upends her world. Those were were closest to her betray her, and she cannot believe in the goodness and truth of love offered from a pure heart. She lives behind the walls of her heart, protecting her fault line—the most vulnerable place in her body.

This is the question that Wild Reverence explores: Is love worth the risk?

This is the beginning of the end, I thought. If heartless gods can be made soft by such love, we are all doomed.

Love in Weakness

Matilda is terrified of showing weakness, and for good reason. The things you love can be held against you by those who seek to gain something from you. That is the lesson that Matilda learns young.

Wild Reverence is Matilda’s journey toward learning how to love—first Vincent, then Bade, Nathaniel, Adria, and the people of the land. She learned how to protect herself from greed and corruption by growing up in the courts of the gods; she learns how to protect others from greed and corruption by living among mortal humans.

There is something about humanity that compellingly portrays love in weakness.

A core belief of Christianity is that Jesus became human. A God—the God who created all of heaven and earth—lowered himself to become human and live among human beings.

I think we sometimes forget what that means. It’s nearly incomprehensible; why would a God become human, especially the God of every created thing, who holds the very power of breath in his hand?

1 John 3:16 says, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.”

Jesus Christ, the incarnated human-God, laid down his life for us—humans—to show us what real love is.

She was at her most powerful when she embraced the weakness it required.

Love is paradoxical like that. It’s what Jesus called “the kingdom of God”—it’s an upside-down way of life that doesn’t look anything like the corporate, over-sexualized world of mass entertainment, business, and politics. It’s the opposite of North American ‘tough’ masculinity. It is gentle, but not weak at all, as it cuts through the facade of what we think power is, redefining it at its foundation.

What Wild Reverence Gets Right

Matilda resists vulnerability every step of the way, until she realizes that this also refuses the opportunity to love. It rejects relationships and connections with others.

She learns that loving humans is not a weakness; it is where life happens. She is a Christ-like figure who offers herself self-sacrificially, taking wounds upon her body, so that others may live. She walks in the realm of death, offering new life.

In a strange way, I felt as if I were preparing myself to be sacrificed upon an altar.

Jesus’ way is one of… well, love. Self-sacrifice. Kindness. Gentleness. Y’know, all those things that Paul said the Spirit bears fruit within us, and all those things that sociologists are saying lead to happier lives and longer life-spans.

Turns out, Jesus knew how to achieve a better way of life long before Brené Brown happened on the scene.

Jesus’ Way is the opposite of self-serving arrogance, self-reliance, pride, and selfish ladder-climbing ambition and greed. It is humble. Simple. Good.

While Wild Reverence is not explicitly a Christian novel (though Ross credits her Heavenly Father in the acknowledgments and she openly talks about her faith in Jesus), it is built upon deeply Christian themes of self-sacrificial love and the upside-down kingdom of God.

Final Reflections

All analogies fall short, especially when making comparisons to the God of all Creation, the God who was Incarnated and lived and died among humans, and the God who rose again and poured out his Spirit onto all humanity.

Matilda doesn’t do most of those things, but she does learn how to give herself for love. She also learns where to draw the line and stop abuses of power in the name of love. It is a boundaried love.

Is love weakness? Well, yes. But it is also power. It is justice for the vulnerable. It is strength in the struggle. It is, in the upside-down way of God’s kingdom, the path to life, connection, and relationships.

Love is power in weakness.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (John 4:7-12)

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