I thought this was really great...
enjoy, ponder, reflect--and love.
What is this thing called love?
Jan 31, 2006
by Maggie Gallagher
...there's the experience of being on the receiving end: "I saw you there, one wonderful day. You took my heart and threw it away. That's why I ask the Lord in heaven above, what is this thing called love?" Sing it, Cole.
I knew Pope Benedict was a brilliant intellect, a German academic theologian of some note. But nobody told me the man has the soul of a poet. This pope writes of our longing for the "apparently irresistible promise of happiness" glimpsed in the love "between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings."
"All other kinds of love," Pope Benedict acknowledges, "immediately seem to fade in comparison."
How can we trust ourselves to love? How can love ever be commanded (as Jesus commands us) or even promised (as we all do in marriage)?
The classic Catholic answer is to say that love is an act of the will. We can choose to act in loving, faithful and benevolent ways even if we do not particularly feel like it. In this sense, love can be both commanded and promised.
But that is not enough for this pope, because it is not enough for the human heart. Nobody wants to be loved as an act of the will. Yet the promise of eros is notoriously unreliable. One currently popular solution is to downgrade our expectations, to pretend that our sexual desire is merely bodily appetites, "enjoyable and harmless." "An intoxicated and undisciplined eros" is not ecstasy; it is instead "a fall, a degradation of man. Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified." Evidently.
Yet selfless love is not possible for human beings. "He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift."
Pope Benedict is a poet because he can name the deepest longing of our soul. He's a prophet because he writes like a man who knows the answer: "God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation -- the Logos, primordial reason -- is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love."
We can love because we are first loved. Love is the cause of our being.
Knowing that, the pope tells us (convincingly, like a man who knows) we can still believe in hope, faith and charity.
But the greatest of these is love.
This article is from TownHall.com columns. Link to the orginal article at:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/maggiegallagher/2006/01/31/184660.html
4 comments:
This reminds me of the greatest commandment. (Matthew 22:36 NIV). Jesus replied, " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments" (Matthew 22:37-40 NIV).
Everything hinges on these two commandments. We can begin to understand this when we realize how much God loves us... For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16
I had heard about Pope Benedict's book on the topic of love earlier on in the news. There have been many our our spiritual leaders talking about love and the Greatest Commandment. This is very encouraging as it is helping people realize that there is a way out of the desparation we somtimes find ourselves in.
You're welcome Dax!
I am glad that my life via blogging is encouraging.
That's beautiful, and interesting coming from a man who is in a position that does not allow him to ever fully experience or understand the type of love God places between a man and a woman. Usually the most poetic souls are the most tortured. He expresses so clearly, something his heart cannot have. sad.
The last two commentators, and others, might find it interesting to read Wendell Berry's "Jayber Crow" as they ponder the extent to which a celibate person might truly experience eros.
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