Verbum Dei UK

This week’s meditations are taken from a talk that Greg Morgan, a Verbum Dei priest, gave in a retreat to families on the Isle of Wight, in July 2010.

MONDAY: JOHN 15 ; MATTHEW 5:43-48

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As I said at the beginning, the word “love”, like the word “virtue”, has been bandied around so much that it has lost much of its significance, and has ended up today meaning many different things to many different people. If we take what Hello magazine or the tabloids print as a rule, we find very little in the concept of love to call it “virtuous”! And one has only got to take a look at most of the music videos being churned out to see how physically and sensually love is presented, rather than as a deep reality of the heart! But, on the other hand, you could be forgiven for thinking that the love being spoken about in Church circles is “all work and no play”, joyless and with hardly any fun at all. Perhaps we priests are the worst offenders, having portrayed true love unrealistically - even exaggeratedly – and for too long as “pure selflessness”, as “nothing-in-it-for-me” stuff, which couldn’t be much further from the truth either. So, to get a balanced view of love as a perfecting virtue and as something wholesomely delightful – all in the space of a few minutes - is no easy task, but well worth the effort in attempting!

For love is a contradictory enigma!! It is both a given thing to others and a satisfaction of one’s deep needs at the same time; it really is only kept when it is given away. Yet the virtue of love – both on the receiving end and on the giving end – is what makes a person flourish. So much so that children brought up in institutions without affection develop differently to children raised affectionately by mothers even in state prisons!! Love is what makes us essentially human. We all know how good it feels to be loved, and how much we thrive when we feel appreciation, approval, and affirmation from others.

Lord, help us to understand what love is for you; which kind of love you created us to grow into.

TUESDAY: GENESIS 1:31

One particular definition of love that I have come across, the one that most convinces me, is that love delights in the very existence of another, it seeks to reinforce approval of another person’s life. It is when we can say to them, “Oh, how good it is that you exist! What a buzz to have you here in this world!” Love is much much more than a feeling; it is a decision to affirm the value of the other person, not for their intelligence, good looks, talents or other capabilities, but simply as and for who they are. And, even if love was attracted in the first place by one’s qualities, (charm, looks, sense of humor), once loves becomes real it will penetrate to the core of the other person, so that even when they lose those qualities with age, sickness or demise, love will be what remains behind. It means that that person simply cannot drop off your radar any longer!

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God’s love is not just creation but affirmation. For even God didn’t just content himself to create us and leave us be, to “set-and-forget”; he wanted for us to know how “very good” (Gen 1:31 ) we are to him, how mind blowing it is even for him that we exist! If our human love could become kind of like an imitation of this, a repetition of God’s creative and affirmative love for us, then we can’t be too far off track, can we?

WEDNESDAY: LUKE 7:36-50

Love seeks to value a person way beyond what that person values their own life. But, exactly how does love make a world of difference in people’s lives? It would seem that being created to most people is really not enough; nor is it enough to have heard it said in the past. The old excuse between married people, on being asked “do you love me” with the “Well, I married you, didn’t I!?” is no satisfactory answer at all; people thrive on continually learning how much they mean to others. Yet sometimes we experience embarrassment in hearing someone say that they think the world of us… “He wouldn’t think that if he really knew me!” How could anyone really revel in our being alive, knowing all along that we don’t really measure to their expectations!! Yet they are not lying; the eyes of someone who loves often intuitively see beyond all the shortcomings, the “ugly” reality we might see in ourselves, to see us as we could be, not just as we are!! To see us as whom we will become precisely because we are loved!!

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Jesus, help us to grow into that love, which you had towards all those you met during your life, that love you keep having towards us.

THURSDAY: MATTHEW 7:1-5 . 12; LUKE 15:1-7

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Love thus becomes a virtue for the one on the receiving end! We all know how this can have a really positive effect in others; for rather than discounting it all as flattery or misplaced appreciation, it can actually cause us to secretly feel that, at last, someone actually understands me, someone sees the real me inside!! I have witnessed time and time again how this kind of projecting love can have the effect of encouraging, urging, cajoling, - even almost embarrassing people - to become this beauty that the other has seen in them looking through the eyes of love. Maybe the first thing we really ought to admit to ourselves is that, deep down, we really ardently long to be praised, acknowledged, loved in this way. So why not “Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you?” (Mat 7:12)

But love cannot be all “approval” and no correction either; no lover can look on happily when they see the one they love preferring what is not really worthy of him or her… Nobody rejoices in seeing a loved one addicted to heroin; a parent can never be satisfied whilst her child burns his bridges and gives away great opportunities. Our loving appraisal means that we will them to be the best they can be. Love is an act of the will, it is a decision we make, and it translates also into loving concern. Some might argue that love should just accept each person as they are, warts and all; but we all know that what a person will be in the future depends on the foundations they are laying in the present; whilst we accept people for who and what we are, we also look for ways to inspire them to be better...

Love forgives all but excuses nothing. That is why we need to understand that the virtue of love is such that it willingly forgives everything but uncompromisingly excuses nothing. To ignore something wrong in another is the same as saying, I really don’t care what she does, she can go to her for all I care!” But love no longer sees another as separate or outside of my reality but an integral part of it all; it really does matter to me if you aren’t that happy!! So though forgiveness is vital in love, no one would ever wish that the people they love persist in deceiving themselves either; what we desire is not just to say “How truly good it is that you exist”, but also to wish “that everything that exists in you be truly good”.�

FRIDAY: 1 JOHN 4:7-21

Ultimately, the reason for our loving others is that they are loved and cherished by God. Ultimately, what really sustains love is the conviction that everyone who lives has been created by God and that they are all “very good”. Not just those who are particularly outstanding, not just the occasional individual I happen to get along with or even a few close buddies, but everyone. This is what we see brought out in the great Saints, saints like Francis of Assisi for instance.

Sadly, Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, could not bring himself to believe that a “universal human love” was possible; that is, to be able to love everybody: he was convinced that love had to be selective, otherwise it wouldn’t be special, “irreplaceable”, or singled out for attention, and that would do the other person an injustice. Freud also believed that not all people are lovable. Still, not even Freud could ignore the fact that there were exceptional people throughout history, like Francis of Assisi, who had showed a truly universal kind of love even to the most miserable of subjects. Mother Teresa, Maximilian Kolbe, Father Damian of Molokai are others we know of; they were able to forget themselves and love the humanly unlovable, in the slums of Calcutta, in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, in a forgotten leper colony on an island near Hawaii…

But, can love really be devoid of all self interest? Does any lover ever want absolutely nothing for themselves, only the very best for the beloved? Come on, now! And are we not wrong in wanting to satisfy our deep longings for love in the delight of other people’s affections? Can love be at the same time both a virtuous gift and an aching need fulfilled? However, before addressing these questions, we need to understand something basic about human nature, our humanity, and that it: we are all so incredibly needy!! We cannot live without love either!! To not recognize that would be to live outside of reality; no one will ever be fulfilled if they overlook this first basic truth of the “facts of life”. The reality of human love is more complicated that it appears; we need to understand the difference between two words, which represent two different aspects of the one reality of love: eros or self love, and agape (caritas) or selfless love.�

SATURDAY: JOHN 21:15-19

Firstly, eros, self-love is not a dirty word!! And it is not primarily sexual love either; it means all kinds of needy human loves; it even includes the desire to be fulfilled in life, and the craving for happiness and bliss!! Surely that in itself doesn’t make it “un-Christian”!! Eros is a desire that we cannot simply invalidate just because it includes the sexual urge! Rather, it can’t help but color all our emotions and decisions!! On the other hand we Christians love to speak of agape as an almost entirely unselfish love, and thus an authentically Christian love, but usually at the expense of eros, as if eros was something purely superficial, “animal”, the satisfaction of wants and need, or merely a kind of sinful lust. And that is not right either, because we do so only at the cost of negating reality, the reality of us being created as we are and with huge needs, and we cannot lose sight of either side of the equation.

Eros is the beginning and the centre of all loving. So, we cannot simply dispose of our needy humanity as if it didn’t really exist or didn’t really matter; a leopard “cannot change its spots” and nor can we change our nature. “Self-love” is not necessarily “self-ish”; there is a valid human need for self preservation, and the same goes for all our basic passions. Eros is actually also the beginning and the centre of all loving! Heaven forbid!! The natural God-given urges in us for fulfillment, happiness, and completion is itself none other than “self-love” and part and parcel of our being created. St. Thomas Aquinas was also very clear on this point: we were created to be happy and fulfilled and we cannot wish to be otherwise! Thomas goes on to say that our cravings for happiness and self love are not only perfectly “in order” but that they are actually the indispensable beginnings of all perfection in love!! As St. Augustine tells us, “If you do not know how to love yourself well, you cannot truthfully love your neighbor.”

What then of selfless love? How can it then be possible to be selfless, if the human being by nature is desperately in need of happiness, joy, satisfaction and cannot be otherwise!! Have we not hit a dead end? Greg, you’ve dug yourself into a corner!! Still, how could we deny what we all know deep down inside to be true, that genuine love never seeks itself? Is this just a kind of Christian utopia, an unrealistic ideal that is humanly impossible to achieve? Is it not also not true, that the most unselfish moments of our life, when we have done some “random act of kindness” to others, that we were actually happiest precisely then? And if then eros, self love, is basically the desire for happiness and fulfillment in life, then maybe the question we ought to ask ourselves is, in what does that happiness and fulfillment actually consist?

If it is true that joy and happiness are in response to loving people, and if loving is its own reward in itself – then it must likewise be true that our desire for happiness and fulfillment can also be satisfied by unselfish love. We need not think in terms of opposites anymore, of “bad” self love and “good” selfless love; there is no gulf separating the two, and it might well be impossible to say exactly where the desire for happiness and fulfillment (eros) ends and unselfish joy in the happiness of others (agape/caritas) begins. And even if agape (caritas) be defined as something “supernatural”, that is, as a virtue which is nourished not by our own strengths but through divine grace, it must still not be thought of as something strictly separated from the natural self love we are born with, and which relentlessly pushes us to seek happiness and fulfillment. As St Thomas has said, “were natural self love or eros not good in itself, then caritas (agape) or divine love could never perfect it!!”

To end with, we have the testimony of Saint Bernard (of Clairvaux): “All true love is without calculation and nevertheless is instantly given its reward, in fact it can receive its reward only when it is without calculation. .. Whoever seeks only the joy of love as the reward of his love will receive the joy of love. But whoever seeks anything else in love except love will lose both love and the joy of love at the same time.”

©Verbum Dei Community * 2010

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