Trained Up in True Love, part 1

The Freedom of the Gift
For love to be true, it must first be free. For no one can force love or make one love another against one's own will. Love must always be free. But, freedom exists for the sake of love and not the other way around. Love does not exist for the sake of freedom. It is always a tragedy when a person breaks his relationship because, he feels, it limits his freedom. "I'm too young to settle down. I have so much I want to do."

Love does limit your freedom in very real ways. Saying "I do!" to one woman implies alongside it a million little "I don'ts" to every other woman in the world. As a man marrying one woman, if he knows what is best for him, he has effectively unmarried every other woman in the world, he has cut them off forever as being an option for his heart. Nope buddy, that is it.

However, in another sense it is precisely this love that busts open the very nature of freedom and takes it to a whole new level. The dynamism of Christian love, which is always utterly human and also completely divine, widens the individual human heart when it is given away to one's beloved in such a total fashion. Freedom serves love, but love broadens freedom. By loving this one woman "until death do you part," you have opened up a new world of giving and receiving that was not possible a few months before.

Another problem that often afflicts human relationships is that people are not really free. Sure, they might not be slaves forced into a marriage, but they may be moral slaves to some dark sin, habit or behavior that prevents them from truly giving themselves over to their beloved. Moral freedom is more important then physical freedom. It is why the Scriptures tell us over and again that it is better to be wise and poor than a fool who is king. The king is a slave to his foolishness. But moral slavery to sin is even worse than ignorance because it corrupts what it encounters, like Midas' touch in reverse. In order to freely give yourself, you must fully possess yourself. In order to possess yourself, you must have self-control. It is this idea of self-control and moral discipline that has fallen completely out of fashion in today's culture. But if you want to give yourself away in love, you cannot give what you do not have. Fasting, abstinence, disciplining your will, your flesh, your passions, all of this serves the cause of true, internal, moral freedom. And love, for it to be real love, must be always free.

The Two Disguises: Lust & Infatuation
The problem with our fallen human nature, especially in us young people, is that love is often manifested in two really big ways. One way is the counterfeit, lust. The other way is the halfway house: infatuation. These can become two painful distractions that cause more pain and heartache than anything else in a relationship because these two problems tend to disguise themselves as love. Lust and infatuation have always been with us, damaging relationships and breaking hearts, but today we have experienced the widespread cultural acceptance of lust and infatuation. In fact, especially in youth culture, these are the only two forms that seem to matter any more, which is horrid because they are passing, illusory, and emptying.

Lust and Infatuation due the same thing but from two different angles. They each commit the grave sin of reduction. Lust reduces the beloved to their sexual value. Infatuation reduces the person to their sentimental/emotional value. To reduce someone from their intrinsic value and high dignity (dare we say "sanctity") of being a person to just this or that specific characteristic is to loose sight of loves wholeness. In a sense, love is wholeness. As the good Pope John Paul II once quipped, "Pornography is wrong not because it shows too much, but because it shows too little. It reduces the person to just his/her sexual value."

Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said that there are three sins that humanity struggles with in three different phases of life. The young (teens and adults) struggle with lust. The middle-aged struggle with greed. And it is the old who struggle with the desire for power. The more ministry I do with parents, young adults, and teens, the more I realize this to be true.

Lust is so easy to fall into for young adults and teens because it taps into their energy, their zeal, their refusal to compromise or to water down life. But it also taps into the fact that, when it comes to life, love and relationships, the young are still just rookies. The lack of moral experiences, of years of developing endurance, long suffering, and dedication to principles just is not there and cannot be there due to a lack of the quantity of years. So this is where moral training needs to take place, especially in the areas of discipline, commitment, and abstinence.

But for teens in a unique way that I don't think the young adults deal with as much is the tendency to reduce love to its sentimental or emotional value. I cannot begin to list the tales of high school and junior high girls that have come up to me extolling the virtues of their "true love" and their "fairly tale" romance, only to have it end a week or two later. Many teens cycle quickly through boyfriends and girlfriends because they are hungering for emotional attachments and satisfaction. Their relationships are like the grain of seed that falls upon the shallow soil. It sprouts quickly, but fails dramatically, because its roots are not deep enough to sustain growth and weather bad times. It is the emotional high of being in love that keeps them coming back for more.

I once knew a girl whose boyfriend committed suicide after she broke up with him. She mourned, as did we all, for this horrific loss. After two or so weeks go by, she had another boyfriend! While this relationships was a massive attempt to rebound and to heal, this was her typical behavior. At the conclusion of each relationship, a new one was started two weeks later.

I described infatuation as "a halfway house" to love because true love can start there. Love most certainly involves the emotions! Love is not a rational head game between two persons who reasoned their lives into one synthesis, but is a total giving and receiving. As long as these young lovers persist in loving through the emotional onto the higher planes, then infatuation is just fine. But if it stops there, if it remains this weak, sentimental thing, then it is ultimately destructive, fading away like plants with shallow roots. Emotions are too fickle to be the basis of the bond between two persons.

So in conclusion, for love to be true it must be both free and total. Love cannot settle for a halfway house to compromise with counterfeits. It cannot be taken, but freely given by persons truly at liberty with themselves. "For freedom Christ set you free!"