By Early in my speaking career I gave a two-day workshop on St. John Paul II’s teachings. Halfway through the second day, one of the participants pointedly asked, “You’ve covered a lot of material, but why haven’t you said anything about love?”
Interiorly, I sputtered in my tracks. Exteriorly, I tried to refrain from expressing horror as I thought, “Love? What do you mean I haven’t said anything about love? That’s all I’ve been talking about – ‘gift of self’ is love!”
Somehow, in my mind, the connection was obvious. When St. John Paul II says, “Man…cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself,” [quoting Gaudium et Spes 24] it’s the same as saying, “The human person is created to express love through self-gift.” And yet, the connection wasn’t obvious to those taking my workshop.
Since that day many years ago, my own understanding of love as total self-gift has gone through wave after wave of painful growth and expansion. Somehow, though, it seems our contemporary culture has been marching to a different drummer. The messages swirling around us announce, “Love is love!” “Love is a feeling!” “Love is willing the good of the other!” So, which is it?
Simply stated, two of these answers belong together and the third is misleading. Can you guess which one veers us away from the fullness of truth? The answer is: “Love is love” because it makes love self-referential.
“Why is this a problem?” you might ask. Because no reality can be defined by itself. In order to understand what something is, we have to define it by qualities and characteristics that are similar to but also distinguishingly different from other realities. (Think: A dog has four legs, a tail, fur, and it barks…)
So, then, what is love? How can we provide at least an initial definition of love within the confined space of a blog? The two other descriptions cited above provide a helpful foundation.
In many Catholic circles, I’ve heard the following pronouncement as if it were definitive Catholic doctrine: “Love is not a feeling. It is willing the good of the other.” Is that true? Is love not a feeling?
Of course love is a feeling. Any couple in love can tell you how overwhelming their feelings are. Parents love their children, often at first sight, with a startling intensity that is surprising even to them. Best friends love each other and can experience heart-wrenching grief when one moves to a faraway location. Soldiers feel a protective love for their country to the point of being willing to give their lives for their fellow citizens.
Love is indeed a feeling. However, it is not only a feeling. If love were simply an emotional sensation, then love would be temporary, fleeting, unpredictable, and terribly tragic. What happens when the love feelings are gone, evaporated?
Mercifully, the gap caused by the absence of loving feelings is filled in by the will. The will can provide a stable and reasoned disposition even when feelings of closeness and connectedness disappear, or when persistent sacrifice and discomfort are required, or when infidelity or tragic loss slap us in the face.
Love as both a feeling and an act of the will is true not only of our human relationships, but of our relationship with God. God doesn’t simply will our good, He moves toward us in an intimate bond of love. Pope Benedict XVI daringly echoed St. John Paul II’s spousal understanding of salvation (see my last post) in his first encyclical, “God is Love” (Deus Caritas Est). Pope Benedict XVI was known as a deeply interior, quiet, and rational thinker, and yet he clearly states: God’s love for man may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape (see DCE, no. 9).
How’s that for a 6.6 magnitude earthquake? God’s love for you is eros; it desires and seeks union with the Beloved (that’s you). At the same time, God’s love for you is also totally agape; it always and only wills your good. Pope Benedict also wrote, “[M]an can indeed enter into union with God…. a unity in which God and man remain themselves and yet become fully one” (DCE, no. 10).
Wow! That’s the kind of God I want to be in a relationship with! That’s the kind of love I hope will permeate our entire culture because it has a content and a meaning that harken back to our being created male and female, to our being created for union and communion not only naturally, but supernaturally. God doesn’t want to blot us out or absorb us into Himself. He wants the two, you and God, to remain distinctly two and yet to become fully one. That’s true love!
