What Love Isn't

What was the last thing you did show God that you loved him? Was it showing up late for Mass or that last little "white-sin" you committed, oh you know, the one you weren't quite sure if it was a sin or not but decided to do it anyways and confess it later? How about that Novena you started but skipped days 3, 5 and 8? Oh wait, I know, it was the way you decided to cut your monetary gift to the parish in half last Christmas so you could get that new Flat Screen LCD TV. Or was it the way you switched parishes so that you could find a priest that wasn't giving homilies about divorce, contraception, pornography, abortion, the poor, service, and sin - and instead talked about happier things like love, justice, and free-trade?

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chasing a love that isn't there

American Catholics will spend millions of dollars this Valentine's day attempting to show love for the special people in their lives and will probably only give God a "glancing look." For someone that loves us so much that he sent His only Son for us only to have Him crucified for all the wrong we have ever done – we sure do seem to take him for granted. We treat God as if he is that girlfriend or boyfriend that we have been dating for a few years, but are more focused on our careers right now than them; but as soon as we get settled with our new job, the condo we just bought, and finally get that sweet new truck we will be able to settle down and establish our relationship at the next level. Yet, many of us will treat the person we are dating as kings or queens – even though we met that someone at some club last Saturday after drinking about 15 Gin and Tonics, and started dating them even though they weren't quite as "cute" the next morning.

Love isn't that new flat screen TV we finally bought. Love isn't a new full-ton truck with leather seats. It isn't your dream house with stainless steel appliances, 3 bathrooms, a home theatre and 3-car garage. It isn't even that 20-something who goes to your gym, who drives the nice Audi, is a CPA, and owns a 4 bedroom/3 bath the next suburb over. Love isn't the new 3rd baseman for your favorite team, and love isn't having just one child so you can spoil them. Love isn't both spouses working so that you can spend winters on St. Thomas. Love isn't a bracelet from Tiffany's. Love definitely isn't a box of chocolates and a dozen roses cut by some worker who is paid 35 cents an hour. Love isn't any of these things. Love isn't a feeling... 

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what love is...

Love in action

Love is asking for a Crucifix to clutch to as you are burned at the stake. Love is asking to be turned over, as you are grilled to death. Love is putting aside all worldly comforts for small room with a bed, desk, and a few books. Love is working with the poor, dying, and destitute. Love is never having the world know your name but God calling you a Saint. Love really is laying down your life... for the one that laid down His. Catholic martyrs are love ... Christ is Caritas.

The problem is that we contrast Romantic Love with true... deep... Love. We, those who use the english language, lack multiple words for love, such as Eros, Agape, and Caritas. Even worse we conflate, confuse, equivocate, and misunderstand what the different types of love really are. Michael Novak recently wrote an article for First Things, that while it isn't his best work, does contrast the difference between what many view as romantic [Eros] love and a true romantic love leading to deep Caritas love:

Do not too many of the young persons you know believe that true happiness is to be found in true romantic love? (They may not know how to distinguish true romantic love, but they seek desperately to try it out, so that at last they can become “happy.” For so many, “happiness” means romantic love.) 

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Romantic love is to be contrasted with the Christian vision of human love. Unlike romantic love, it is plain from scripture that God expected—nay, commanded—his followers to consummate their relationships: “Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” Sexuality is a crucial part of human life, both for deeply personal growth and, second, for the continuance and prospering of the human community as a whole. The Christian (and emphatically the Catholic) view of the human being is that sex is a natural expression, not only of the body, but of the soul. 

Von Hildebrand sees all the many varieties of human love—he distinguishes eight or nine different loves, each with its own proper name—as designed to fold into each other, all converging upwards into a rich, symphonic unity. This unity culminates in that greatest of all gifts, the caritas which is proper only and solely to the Persons of the Trinity for one another. The caritas that makes them one. This caritas is also the force which impels the Lord to overflow his identity, diffusing caritas throughout the human race, inspiriting the race, raising its sights and aspirations, transforming the world like yeast in dough, or the heat of white-hot ingots glowing in the night.

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But the love of man and wife is also very high and beautiful, precisely insofar as it may be penetrated by supernatural caritas. As Von Hildebrand writes: “It is caritas that empowers those who are animated by it to enter the kingdom of holy goodness, and it is caritas that brings about the dominion of the humble, reverent, and loving center in them over the center of pride and concupiscence.” Not a bad statement of the fulfillment of spousal love.

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what are we chasing?

So, you see, love isn't about chasing some romantic and eros [read: erotic?] version of something or someone one. We may think it is, and it may intoxicate us to the point where we think that we are chasing love but we aren't. The second we fulfill that Eros desire that we seek, we no longer have the burning sensation that drove us - we fall short in obtaining true love. As Novak puts it:

This is why romantic love desperately needs obstacles. If romantic love were to lead too quickly to physical consummation, it would cease being romantic.

This is why we want the girl in the too-short skirt we saw at Starbucks, the new car we saw on TV, the Flat Screen TV, the iPad, a new house, new clothes, etc... We are chasing a desire, or more properly: we are existing in a desire that we will one day achieve that such thing and it will somehow transcend that desire into a higher form of love. 

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fast-food type of love

Unfortunately in our culture we have spent so much time on the chase that the kill isn't sweet for us. We aren't satisfied with taking love to the next level because there is a disconnect for us. What we view as important and what God views as important lack any continuity, we don't want to transcend that catch to the next level of love, because we don't really care for it that much. We want the easy feelings, we want the intoxication, we want the thrill and none of the work. We have a fast-food type of desire for love: we want it hot, fast, and easy to obtain, we don't care if it is bad for us, doesn't give us any nutrients, or really satisfy our hunger – its smell lures us in, we are hooked, and we don't care if it leaves us feeling sick and empty when we are finished. Novak explains:

If and when eros does vanquish all obstacles, it ceases to be romantic love. It now must choose between commitment to a concrete other with all the limitations of that other, or a once-and-for-all break-up. For with consummation, illusion is shattered. Flesh meets flesh. The reality of the human condition sets in. As a result, the most satisfactory ending for the tale of romantic love is not, as one would think, physical consummation or even “growing old together.” It is, actually, death, while longing still pierces the heart. For then the living member of the couple can go on loving infinitely, forever, above the ordinariness of mere earth. Or else, if that empty fate is simply unbearable, the remaining beloved can also meet a tragic death. Now that is really satisfying: when a man and a woman continue in romantic love eternally, by means of the untimely death of both. That is real tragedy, a real arrow of love to the heart, the best of all Western tales.

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Romeo and Juliet were fools

We believe in our culture that Romeo and Juliet had a love deeper and purer than almost any. We are taught to long for a love like that. We are fools – we have been duped. What a stupid concept – star crossed lovers – love isn't decided by the stars, our hearts are not in the hands of fate. Romeo and Juliet were idiots - and we are the same if we want what they had, because they had nothing. They thought that in death they would eternally have that desire and longing for one another - the ultimate fix: a love's desire that is never consummated but forever in chase. How stupid are we? How weak are we? How lame are we to want to pursue and never catch? We are the hunter who finds, chases, and shoots his prey... only to leave it dead and bleeding on the mountainside - the effort to retrieve it too much for the pleasure of mounting the trophy.

We are conditioned to believe that longing somehow is what love is, but it isn't... longing is longing, love is... sacrifice, it is choice, it is commitment, it is all those things in the 1st Corinthians litany. Romeo and Juliet were fools, they had a selfish kind of love where if they couldn't have what they each individually wanted than they would rather die. It wasn't about the other person – it was about themselves individually – they were selfish brats. Christ's love was about dying but not because He couldn't have us... instead it was so that we could have, HIM!

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The Devil attacks through love all the time. Don't think that in such a thing we are safe from the attacks of evil. Think of all the ways love is distorted and confused so as to deceive us. Sex - love's ultimate combination of the physical and spiritual has been stripped of its spiritual element. The Devil does this to convince us, that there isn't any spiritual aspect to it. If an act of love can be made to be purely physical, then there is no harm, but for physical harm, in the act. If that is the case - elimination of the physical harm leaves the act as nothing more than an act to show or prove one's love for another. It makes it akin to giving a box of candy, sending roses, or doing your loved one's laundry. Of course this isn't true - but it is just one way the Devil attacks us through love and deceives us with a distortion of the good.

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the revelation - a world upside-down

Don't think this comes easy for me. A week ago if you would have asked me I would have told you that Romeo and Juliet was one of the best love stories ever written, it isn't - it is a culturally apologetic story rationalization of how we do act instead of how we should act - I realize this now. I have known that love isn't about a feeling or a pursuit – instead it is about what happens when the chase ends, but then why did I embrace such a story? Love is about finding someone that makes you better and helps you to understand, embrace and perfect your love... so that one day we you can love God perfectly. When we get to Heaven love will be about God – not ourselves, our spouse, our pet, our car, our house or anything else we have. It will be about God. So our love now, needs to be a transcendence towards God, otherwise it will be unrealized and unfulfilling, just like fast-food.

I could keep writing about what love is and what it isn't, but it wouldn't do any good. Just like a junkie, the second we get our next taste of something we desire, it will drive us into a frenzy. Because we are weak and our hearts are focused on the wrong things, we will chase that desire until we consummate it. Then we will move onto the next thing we desire. Our focus is wrong - our perspective is incorrect.

 If God is love... then our true love should be God. "Our heart is restless until it rests in God." If we love God first and best... all our other love will become pure and properly focused.

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