Love
Without qualification, without ifs, ands,
or buts, God's word tells us, straight as a left jab, that love is the greatest
thing there is (1 Cor 13: 13). Scripture never says God is justice or beauty or
righteousness, though he is just and beautiful and righteous. But "God is
love" (1 Jn 4:8). Love is God's essence, his whole being. Everything in
him is love. Even his justice is love. Paul identifies "the justice of
God" in Romans 1:17 with the most unjust event in all history, deicide,
the crucifixion, for that was God's great act of love.
But no word is
more misunderstood in our society than the word love. One of the most useful
books we can read is C. S. Lewis' unpretentious little masterpiece The Four
Loves. There, he clearly distinguishes agape, the kind of love Christ taught
and showed, from storge (natural affection or liking), eros (sexual desire),
and philia (friendship). It is agape that is the greatest thing in the world.
The old word for
agape in English was charity. Unfortunately, that word now means to most people
simply handouts to beggars or to the United Fund. But the word love won't do
either. It means to most people either sexual love (eros) or a feeling of
affection (storge), or a vague love-in-general. Perhaps it is necessary to
insist on the Greek word agape (pronounced ah-gah-pay) even at the risk of
sounding snobbish or scholarly, so that we do not confuse this most important
thing in the world with something else and miss it, for there is enormous
misunderstanding about it in our society.
Feelings come to us, passively; love comes from us,
actively, by our free choice.
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The first and most usual misunderstanding of
agape is to confuse it with a feeling. Our feelings are precious, but agape is
more precious. Feelings come to us, passively; agape comes from us, actively,
by our free choice. We are not responsible for our feelings-we can't help how
we feel-but we are responsible for our agape or lack of it, eternally
responsible, for agape comes from us; feelings come from wind, weather, and
digestion. "Luv" comes from spring breezes; real love comes from the
center of the soul, which Scripture calls the heart (another word we have
sentimentalized and reduced to feeling). Liking is a feeling. But love (agape)
is more than strong liking. Only a fool would command someone to feel a certain
way. God commands us to love, and God is no fool.
Jesus had
different feelings toward different people. But he loved them all equally and
absolutely. But how can we love someone if we don't like him? Easy-we do it to
ourselves all the time. We don't always have tender, comfortable feelings about
ourselves; sometimes we feel foolish, stupid, asinine, or wicked. But we always
love ourselves: we always seek our own good. Indeed, we feel dislike toward
ourselves, we berate ourselves, precisely because we love ourselves; because we
care about our good, we are impatient with our bad.
We fall in love
but we do not fall in agape. We rise in agape.
God is agape, and
agape is not feeling. So God is not feeling. That does not make him or agape
cold and abstract. Just the opposite: God is love itself, feeling is the dribs
and drabs of love received into the medium of passivity. God cannot fall in
love for the same reason water cannot get wet: it is wet. Love itself cannot
receive love as a passivity, only spread it as an activity. God is love in
action, not love in dreams. Feelings are like dreams: easy, passive,
spontaneous. Agape is hard and precious like a diamond.
Love's object is always the concrete individual, not
some abstraction called humanity.
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This brings us to
a second and related misunderstanding. Agape's
object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity.
Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with
inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and
begging.
Jesus commands us
to love not humanity but our neighbor, all our neighbors, the real individuals
we meet, just as he did. He died for me and for you, not for humanity. The
Cross has our names on it, not the name "humanity". When Jesus called
himself the Good Shepherd, he said he "calls his own sheep by name"
(Jn 10:3). The gospel comes to you not in a newspaper with a Xeroxed label,
"Dear Occupant", but in a handwritten envelope personally addressed
to you, as a love letter from God to you alone. One of the saints says that
Jesus would have done everything he did and suffered everything he suffered
even if you were the only person who had sinned, just for you. More than that,
he did! This is no "if"; this is fact. His loving eyes saw you from
the Cross. Each of his five wounds were lips speaking your name.
Grandfathers are kind;
fathers are loving. |
A third, related,
misunderstanding about love is to confuse it with kindness, which is only one
of its usual attributes. Kindness is the desire to relieve another's suffering.
Love is the willing of another's good. A father can spank his child out of
love. And God is a father.
It is painfully
obvious that God is not mere kindness, for he does not remove all suffering,
though he has the power to do so. Indeed, this very fact-that the God who is
omnipotent and can at any instant miraculously erase all suffering from this
world deliberately chooses not to do so-is the commonest argument unbelievers
use against him. The number one argument for atheism stems from the confusion
between love and kindness.
The more we love
someone, the more our love goes beyond kindness. We are merely kind to pets,
and therefore we consent that our pets be put to death "to put them out of
their misery" when they are suffering. There is increasing pressure in America to legalize euthanasia (so far only Nazi
Germany and now Holland
Grandfathers are
kind; fathers are loving. Grandfathers say, "Run along and have a good
time"; fathers say , "But don't do this or that." Grandfathers
are compassionate, fathers are passionate. God is never once called our
grandfather, much as we would prefer that to the inconveniently close,
demanding, intimate father who loves us. The most frequently heard saying in
our lives is precisely the philosophy of a grandfather: "Have a nice
day." Many priests even sanctify this philosophy by ending the Mass with
it, though the Mass is supposed to be the worship of the Father, not the
Grandfather.
"God is love" is the profoundest thing we have
ever heard. But "love is God" is deadly nonsense.
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A fourth misunderstanding about love is the
confusion between "God is love" and "love is God." The
worship of love instead of the worship of God involves two deadly mistakes.
First it uses the word God only as another word for love. God is thought of as
a force or energy rather than as a person. Second, it divinizes the love we
already know instead of showing us a love we don't know. To understand this
point, consider that "A is B" does not mean the same as "A
equals B." If A = B, then B = A, but if A is B, that does not mean that B
is A. "That house is wood" does not mean "wood is that
house." "An angel is spirit" does not mean the same as
"spirit is an angel." When we say "A is B", we begin with a
subject, A, that we assume our hearer already knows, and then we add a new
predicate to it. "Mother is sick" means "You know mother well,
let me tell you something you don't know about her: she's sick." So
"God is love" means "Let me tell you something new about the God
you know: he is essential love, made of love, through and through." But
"Love is God" means "Let me tell you something about the love
you already know, your own human love: that is God. That is the ultimate
reality. That is as far as anything can ever go. Seek no further for God."
In other words, "God is love" is the profoundest thing we have ever
heard. But "love is God" is deadly nonsense.
You cannot be in love with love.
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A fifth misunderstanding about love is the
idea that you can be in love with love. No, you cannot, any more than you can
have faith in faith, or hope in hope, or see sight. Love is an act, a force, or
an energy, but persons are more than that. What we love with agape can only be
a person, the realest thing there is, because a person is the image of God, who
is ultimate reality, and God's name is I Am, the name for a person. If anyone
says they are in love with love, that love is not agape but a feeling.
If God is not a Trinity, God is not love. For love
requires three things: a lover, a beloved, and a relationship
between them. |
A sixth misunderstanding about love is the
idea that "God is love" is unrelated to dogmatic theology, especially
to the doctrine of the Trinity. Everyone can agree that "God is
love", it seems, but the Trinity is a tangled dogma for an esoteric elite,
isn't it? No. If God is not a Trinity, God is not love. For love requires three
things: a lover, a beloved, and a relationship between them. If God were only
one person, he could be a lover, but not love itself. The Father loves the Son
and the Son loves the Father, and the Spirit is the love proceeding from both,
from all eternity. If that were not so, then God would need us, would be
incomplete without us, without someone to love. Then his creating us would not
be wholly unselfish, but selfish, from his own need.
Love is a flower,
and hope is its stem. Salvation is the whole plant. God's grace, God's own
life, comes into us by faith, like water through a tree's roots. It rises in us
by hope, like sap through the trunk. And it flowers from our branches, fruit
for our neighbor's use.
Faith is like an
anchor. That's why it must be conservative, even a stick-in-the-mud, like an
anchor. Faith must be faithful. Hope is like a compass or a navigator. It gives
us direction, and it takes its bearings from the stars. That's why it must be
progressive and forward-looking. Love is like the sail, spread to the wind. It
is the actual energy of our journey. That's why it must be liberal, open to the
Spirit's wind, generous.
Agape is totally
defenseless against an objection like Freud's: "But not all men are worthy
of love." No, they are not. Love goes beyond worth, beyond justice, beyond
reason. Reasons are always given from above downward, and there is nothing
above love, for God is love. When he was about six, my son asked me,
"Daddy, why do you love me?" I began to give the wrong answers, the
answers I thought he was looking for: "You're a great kid. You're good and
smart and strong." Then, seeing his disappointment, I decided to be
honest: "Aw, I just love you because you're mine." I got a smile of
relief and a hug: "Thanks, Daddy." A student once asked me in class,
"Why does God love us so much?" I replied that that was the greatest
of all mysteries, and she should come back to me in a year to see whether I had
solved it. One year later to the day, there she was. She was serious. She
really wanted an answer. I had to explain that this one thing, at least, just
could not be explained.
When you give yourself away you find that a new and more
real self has somehow been given to you.
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Finally, there is the equally mind-boggling
mystery of the intrinsic paradox of agape: somehow in agape you give yourself
away, not just your time or work or possessions or even your body. You put
yourself in your own hands and hand it over to another. And when you do this
unthinkable thing, another unthinkable thing happens: you find yourself in
losing yourself. You begin to be when you give yourself away. You find that a
new and more real self has somehow been given to you. When you are a donor you
mysteriously find yourself a recipient-of the very gift you gave away.
There is more:
nothing else is really yours. Your health, your works, your intelligence, your
possessions-these are not what they seem. They are all hostage to fortune, on
loan, insubstantial. You discover that when you learn who God is. Face to face
with God in prayer, not just a proper concept of God, you find that you are
nothing. All the saints say this: you are nothing. The closer you get to God
the more you see this, the more you shrink in size. If you scorn God, you think
you're a big shot, a cannonball; if you know God, you know you're not even
buckshot. Those who scorn God think they're number one. Those who have the
popular idea of God think they're "good people". Those who have a
merely mental orthodoxy know they're real but finite creatures, made in God's
image but flawed by sin. Those who really begin to pray find that compared with
God they are motes of dust in the sun. Finally, the saints say they are
nothing. Or else (Saint Paul
Who's right? How
shall we evaluate this insight? Unless God is the Father of lies (the ultimate
blasphemy), the saints are right. Unless the closer you get to God the wronger
you are about yourself, the five groups in the preceding paragraph (from
scorners to saints) form a hierarchy of insight. Nothing is ours by nature. Our
very existence is sheer gift. Think for a moment about the fact that you were
created, made out of nothing. If a sculptor gives a block of marble the gift of
a fine shape, the shape is a gift, but the marble's existence is not. That is
the marble's own. But nothing is our own because we were made out of nothing.
Our very existence is a gift from God to no one, for we were not there before
he created us. There is no receiver of the gift distinct from the gift itself.
We are God's gifts.
So the saints are
right. If I am nothing, nothing that is mine is anything. Nothing is mine by
nature. But one thing is mine by my free choice: the self I give away in love.
That is the thing even God cannot do for me. It is my choice. Everything I say
is mine is not. But everything I say is yours is mine. C. S. Lewis, asked which
of his many library books he thought he would have in heaven, replied,
"Only the ones I gave away on earth and never got back". The same is
true of our very self. It is like a ball in a game of catch: throw it and it
will come back to you; hold onto it and that ends the game.
From Fundamentals of the Faith by Ignatius
Press.
Christianity for Modern Pagans
Fundamentals of the Faith
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