Trained Up in Love, Part II

Always Faithful
Love is not just the emotional satisfaction that one person can offer to another, for that would be too limited and would just be weak sauce. True love has got to be so much more than these tattered attempts at wholeness that the world presents to us as "real love." We may start with the physical beauty of the other or the way that other person makes us feel, but brothers and sisters, we have to keep love moving onwards and upwards from there.

Love, for it to be real, must be faithful.

Many people, especially men it seems (myself included!), have this irrational fear of commitment to another person for the whole of their lives. We can understand why many people feel this way, after all, I did say earlier that love limits freedom because freedom serves love, not the other way around. Giving up options, choices, Plan B, this scares people! And I think in a lot of ways people should be a little scared. Love is a serious thing and should not be entered into lightly. It carries with it the weight of two whole lives, two hearts, the past of two different people and also their futures, even including their eternal destiny. This is heavy stuff!

That being said, love is liberating in a new way. Love opens up new levels of service and self-disterestedness that never could exist in the bachelor's life, which is almost always self-centered. Faithful commitment is so often resisted because we are not used to saying to another, "You" and "Always;" but "Me" and "Now."

So what does it mean to be faithful in love?

First, it means learning how to break yourself of the most dangerous habit that fights against the heart of love, which is the "me-first" disease. The understanding of love as the gift of self to another means that the opposite is the use of others for oneself, which, let us be honest with one another, is really how most of us just naturally think. But for love to be real, love must think, "How can I serve you today?"

How do we break ourselves of this me-first disease? Slowly, but steadily, we have to choose to love the other person each day. Do not rely on the intensity of emotions or the agreeableness of the other person's personality to our own in order to win over your heart. It lies in the power of each man and woman to choose the other and to choose to serve.

And it is in the service of the other than the me-self disease begins to break. Just like any disease, it may take some distasteful medicine in order to cause the cure, but without it we will fail. So without mincing any words or trying to water it down I will just come out and say it: you cannot love someone without dying to yourself, without killing your own goofy self-love. Appealing? Probably not, but it is good and it is the only way to true and lasting love. Why is dying to yourself so important? You have to create room in your heart for your Beloved to truly take root. You have to stop thinking, "What's in it for me?" and you need to start thinking, "How can I love her?" It is in the day-to-day struggle that your love finds its fullness. It is in self-denial that commitment becomes transformed into faithfulness.

Being faithful is not just don't have sex with other people who aren't your spouse. Faithfulness is a positive virtue that is more than a lack of sin, but is a growth of the mind and heart of one person with his beloved. One can refrain from sex but be an adulterer of the eyes. One can refrain from adultery of the eyes, but still be an emotion whore, seeking intimacy that are reserved only for your Beloved. How many wives regard themselves as "harmless flirts" and how many husbands loose control of their eyes when about town or in the office? This wounds faithfulness and reveals deeper levels of selfishness, conceit, or maybe just plain vanity.

Is it Creative?
In his beautiful mediation on love, The Jeweler's Shop, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) expresses a central point that escapes many today when it comes to real love: "only one question is important, is it creative?"

The root of love is freedom, its shoot is completeness, its flower is its faithfulness, and it is with all of these together that love is fruitful, growing and expanding into the lives of the couple and into the lives of others surrounding them. Here, love becomes not just a power between the two, but an environment that overflows into others.

Essentially, love bears fruit. First, in the lives of the lovers as deeper and newer levels of selflessness are discovered. The sick baby, the elderly parents, the meaningless job that clothes and shelters the family, the drudgery and tediousness of the daily grind- all of these become the jagged rocks upon which love spills and splashes itself against, wave upon wave. The Lover discovers new virtues within himself that previously did not exist, as love is the form of virtue, engendering values, virtues, principles, commitments and perspectives that otherwise would never have existed before. The Beloved finds wellsprings of strength and patience, hope and wisdom that were dormant in her sleeping heart before love's wake up call sounded loud.

And the fruitfulness continues as love conquers all.

In the giving of self and the receiving of the other, love reciprocates into a whole environment, but love demands more. Love seeks to turn its gaze from the couple to others, to enlarge their hearts even more than has been up till now. Love is so fruitful that in our human world it takes on a further dimension of creativity; that is, love wills to overflow so much that it will bring about the creation of new persons to be known and loved.

Love, in the eyes of the world, is not creative. It may be expressive, even a little artistic, but it cannot be fruitful because the grain of wheat refuses to fall to the ground and die. At the heart of real, passionate, true love is dying of the one into the life of the other. It is self-sacrificial. The fullness of the fruit comes in the dying of the seed, in its crushing down and breaking open. It is the only way. It is life's way. But our world, on top of being "One wild divorce court" as Chesterton put it, is also dominated by the contraceptive mentality, wounding love's fruitfulness in order to attempt the harnesses of love's pleasures without its demands.

There is the argument that sex, for it to be a positive and loving act, must uphold simultaneously its two ends, or purposes, which are procreation and unity. The act of making love between spouses ought always to be a unifying act, bringing the two bodies closer and causing their to be one heart in place of the two. Also, sex is clearly, naturally, and obviously ordered towards the generation and education of children. But, many hold, sometimes there are good reasons to separate the procreative end from the unitive end, to divorce babies from bonding.

The great tragedy of the situation is the thought that this child created by your reciprocal self-giving to one another is somehow not the ultimate expression of your unity. I mean this clearly: your children are your unity, writ large in their DNA, their personalities and their hearts. The child is the incarnation of the whole environment of your love. The child is the walking, talking, living, breathing enfleshment of two lovers, a love so real that nine months later you have to give him/her a name!

Concluding Remarks
And it is in the creative fruitfulness of love that we can see why there must also be the faithful commitment to one another in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer. A new life needs the loving stability of two parents bound to one another regardless of the obstacles that life throws at them. Love endures because this created life endures. Love is, then, meant to be a sure and stable thing, a rock or fortress in which the garden of love may grow abundantly.


For love to be real, it must be true. For it to be true, it must be free, total, faithful and fruitful. Otherwise, it just cannot satisfy the human heart!


God love you,
Mike
AMDG