All My Love

An unexpected Christmas carol...

One of the loveliest treats to flow to me from the Internet this month has been the release of the quirky and beautiful video accompanying a new song from Coldplay. The song is called, “All my love.” The focus of the video is the 99 year-old Dick Van Dyke. Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, sits at an upright piano to sing the song, sometimes with Dick Van Dyke, sometimes to him, maybe sometimes for him. But this song is generic in the best possible way, it expresses love for whomever and to whomever it needs to be sung. And it holds nothing back; the song promises “all my love.”

Like so many people lucky enough to have grown up when we had fewer choices available to us on TV, I grew up with Dick Van Dyke, in his various personi: in “Chitty, Chitty Bang Bang,” “Mary Poppins,” and most familiarly with his fictional wife Mary Tyler Moore on his eponymous sit-com. I notice in the video that in his old age Dick Van Dyke bears a slight resemblance to my own father, who’s more than a decade younger.

The song returns over and over to the same phrase: “You’ve got all my love." Such a song could be a Christmas carol, since it expresses what Christians believe God intendeds to say to all his people with the gift of his Son, Jesus. And I think part of the reason God sent his love into the world is to make each of us more ready to repeat this phrase to one another, too: You’ve got all my love. Not to cheapen it, or say it when we don’t mean it; but to be more ready to mean it, to be more ready to love, to be more profligate in our love for one another.

At one point in the video, someone asks Dick Van Dyke, “What is love?” He answers, “It certainly is a feeling of caring about the welfare and the life of the other person as much as you care for yourself.” This is not a bad answer, even if it is incomplete. Later on, he says to Chris Martin, “the part I love is ‘until I die, let me hold you till I cry.’ It’s so beautiful.” I find the tender vulnerability of that line coming from a 99 year-old person very moving.

I’m sure that we don’t talk enough about love: real love: the love that says to another, “I want to give myself to you.” I’m sure we don’t organize our lives sufficiently around love. And I think that the joy of Christmas is the sense that God is inviting us to try to reorganize at least a part of our lives around love, at least for a season. I think that’s partly what all the giving is about, since giving is such a big part of loving.

Part of the gift of the Coldplay song, as I say, is the suggestion that love is, in fact, a many-splendored thing (as another song puts it), to be shared in all kinds of ways with all kinds of people. I’m not trying to be melodramatic when I say that this past year has probably been the worst year of my life in many ways. But, it has also been a year in which I have significantly deepened my experience of love, and broadened my expressions of love. So there’s a chance that in retrospect I’ll see that my experience of 2024 wasn’t so bad after all. (I’m dubious, but there’s a chance.) And the reason to share such a reflection is because, as Arlo Guthrie put it, “you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation.” And I want to encourage you, and me, and everyone to be more ready to love, to see Christmas as a season of love and for love. I want us all to see and know how it is that we inhabit the divine image in which we were made when we sing to another, “You’ve got all my love.” And, crappy as this year has been for me, love has never been all that far away, and I have been able to share my own love, too. If that’s not a gift, I don’t know what is.

We sometimes need songs to help us say out loud what we would otherwise keep locked up someplace. I hope and pray that the songs of Christmas, especially the ones about the truth of Christmas - that we’ve got all God’s love - will remind you of something you may have forgotten. If that doesn’t work, I hope you’ll listen to the Coldplay song, and I hope you’ll like it as much as I do. And I hope that you and I will become a little more profligate in sharing our love, more ready to give of ourselves in whatever good ways we can do that, better prepared to know when and where and to whom to sing, “You’ve got all my love.”

Dick Van Dyke, photo by Gage Skidmore