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

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!"