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Ask Theophilus: MY F. (IN THE L.S.)

HERE'S THE ONE I GOT THE TITLE FROM

Dear Professor Theophilus:

Your foil (in the literary sense) has arrived. Me.

In "Thank God for Guilt," you wrote, "better not assume that they'll understand what Christians mean by love. In this fallen world, the concept of love has been spun, warped, distorted, bent and twisted in a hundred different ways."

What is the Christian meaning of love?

I've been waiting for someone to ask that question. What took you so long?

The classic Scriptural passage on love is familiar from innumerable wedding ceremonies (a little surprising, considering that the context of these verses isn't a discussion of matrimony, but of spiritual gifts). Here's the whole text:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.¹

You can see why love has been defined as the commitment of the will to the true good of another person. If someone demands a one-sentence definition of what Christians mean by love, you can say that. Of course it raises questions. If that's what love is, then how is it even possible? Stranger still, how does it become confused with things that seem so different, like lust? To answer questions like that, we need to go deeper.

The concept at the core of the Christian understanding of love is agape.² Agape love is pure gift-love, the pouring out of self for the sake of the other. So often, what we call love is just wanting something. Agape is the opposite. It's giving something.

The origin of agape love is God Himself. This love isn't something that He has; it's what He is. "He who does not love does not know God; for God is love."³ In writing this sentence, St. John doesn't mean that God is an abstraction. He's a burning personal reality, a One in Three, an eternal pouring out of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit for each other. The flabbergasting thing is that He made us in His image. We are supposed to be and become like that too.

God loved us first. Our love has been called the response to the love with which He draws near to us; as St. John wrote, "We love, because he first loved us."⁴ Do you see how this fact puts everything else into focus? The reason we want to pour ourselves out is that we are made in the image of the God who pours Himself out for us; the reason we fall short of such love is that we sin; and the reason we can be restored to the possibility of it is that Christ poured Himself out on the Cross for our redemption. If we cooperate by continually yielding ourselves back to Him, we become united with His sacrifice. He makes His home in us, and He makes us over from the inside out. That makes us gradually more capable of pouring ourselves out as He does.

Now let's slow down, because the fact that we are made in His image requires more attention. To be an image of God is to be like a mirror, designed to reflect Him. I suppose everything that He made reflects something about Him, but we reflect Him in a way that is like no other. Why is that? Because we are persons — not just whats, but whos. But wait! I remarked above that God is a unity among three Persons. I'm just one person; you're just one person; He's three. So how could we possibly reflect Him? Answer: Through love, as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love each other and love us. It's not in our solitary selves that we most perfectly image Him, but in self-giving.

Here things get even more interesting. We don't simply love as God loves; we love through a variety of created possibilities that He built into our nature, each of them different. You see, we aren't flat mirrors, but faceted mirrors, each facet intended to reflect a different aspect of His love. Or perhaps you could think of us as prisms, made to refract the white glory of His uncreated love into all the various colors. Colors? What colors? Like the love of parent for child; like the love of child for parent; like the love of husband for wife; like the love of wife for husband; like the love of brother for brother; like the love of teacher for student; like the love of friend for friend. Each of these loves is different from the others, but each is lovable in itself.

Take, for example, the love of true friends or comrades. In its ideal form it seeks not just companionship in fun, but a partnership in a good life. Its model and highest expression is the brotherhood of Christ with the apostles.

Or take eros, the love between a man and a woman. Erotic love longs for union between two complementary opposites. Because they are truly different, there really is something to join; yet because each provides something missing in the other, they really can join. Together they make not just a doubling of the same kind of who, but a unity of two matching kinds of who.

By the way, eros takes us back to one of the questions raised earlier. Because the joining of bodies in sexual intercourse is one of the dimensions of erotic unity, people often confuse erotic love with the mere desire for sex. But eros that only wants sex is stunted eros. It "says" something that it doesn't really mean, because the joining of two bodies is the language of the body for the joining of two souls. What does the joining of two souls require? It requires the mutual, total, irrevocable, exclusive, and sacrificial gift of self. That's what marriage really is — and that's why St. Paul compares marriage with the love between Christ and the Church.⁵

If you think about all of the human kinds of love, you'll find that each of them becomes most truly itself — most fully discovers its destiny — when it becomes most like agape. Every love that God planted in human nature is meant to lead back to the love of God. Every attempt to love apart from the love of God leads precisely nowhere.

You asked for it.

Peace be with you,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

HOW CAN I GIVE WHAT I'VE GIVEN?

Dear Professor Theophilus:

I was wondering how, if we're supposed to make God our everything, we can give ourselves over to our spouses as completely as I hear people say we should. After God takes over, how can there be any more space to give away in myself in marriage to someone else?

Don't get me wrong, I want to be married some day, but sometimes I struggle with the idea that I'd be giving myself to a mere human being, imperfect, just like me. Am I just being proud?

Maybe I'm confused because I've never been in love. I'm starting to get the impression that real love in the romantic sense is something that can't be understood unless you've experienced it.

The answer to your question flows from the answer to the last question. You're thinking of loving God as though it were just a command, as though God merely snapped "I said love Me with all your heart, so do it!" It is a command, but it's not just a command. The point of it is to be like God, to be united with Him, and He is the Great Lover of Souls. If He pours Himself out for us, then loving others doesn't take away from our unity with Him; it unites us more closely with Him. To quote St. John again, "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us."⁶

Yet I can't blame you for being confused, because when we expand our focus beyond agape love, the picture becomes more complicated. Agape is not exclusive — I mean serving God doesn't keep you from serving other people. On the other hand, erotic love really is exclusive — I mean sex with everyone wouldn't be like being married to all of them (trust me). Do you see now where the complication comes in? In one way erotic love between husband and wife is a training in agape, because they love each other sacrificially. But in another way it's a distraction from agape, because they tend to be absorbed in each other. You can see both sides of this coin in St. Paul. On one hand he praised marriage to the skies, viewing it as an emblem of the relationship of Christ to the Church.⁷ On the other hand, he praised the life of consecrated celibacy more highly still, for those who have the gift for it.⁸

But let's think about you. Is the longing to serve God with an undivided heart why you struggle with the idea of marriage? Let us be honest, shall we? As you explain, your problem is that you simply don't want to give yourself to "a mere human being, imperfect, just like me." Of course it wouldn't please God for you to marry someone unsuitable for marriage, but that's not what you're afraid of. It's the very idea of self-giving that troubles you; nobody is good enough for your gift. Child, Jesus Christ gave Himself for a mere human being, imperfect, just like you; in fact He gave Himself for you. So this isn't about becoming more like Him, is it?

In answer to your question, then, "Am I just being proud?", the answer is "Yes." It's to your credit that you asked, but don't stop there. Go to the Surgeon and get that tooth pulled.

Peace be with you,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

NOT ENOUGH AFTER ALL?

Dear Professor Theophilus:

A lot in your article "Can God Not Be Enough?" makes sense from my own experience. My question is about the "incurable loneliness" that the reader mentioned. I've been wondering about how God created us for fellowship. I mean, not just with God — with other people as well. "Then the Lord God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.'"⁹ Isn't it right to think that God created us to need more than just Him — that He created us to need other people too? In this sense, can't God not be enough?

I've struggled a lot with friendships. My parents were often busy and still are; I consider them little more than very familiar strangers. We moved often throughout my entire life. To top it off, I struggled and still struggle with homosexual feelings.

I know that life in seclusion is not the answer, but saying God is enough for me during all my years of loneliness just doesn't seem to be enough anymore. I'm missing something — right?

Right, you're missing what we've been talking about in the last two letters. But you've also found a great clue: God is enough, but loving others in the way that we were meant to love them isn't in competition with our love for Him; it's an aspect of it. The problem lies in trying to love them in ways that we weren't meant to love them. That way we mess our friends up, we mess ourselves up, and ultimately we betray love itself.

Have courage, and never despair of the possibility of pure friendship. Remember what Paul said of his thorn in the flesh: "Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'"¹⁰

Thanks for your letter. I hope I've answered both of your questions — the one you asked, and the one you didn't.

Peace be with you,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

C O F F E E  S H O P

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Where do you need to work on showing selfless love to people in your life?

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