Screaming into a Storm

Before I entered the seminary, I had the opportunity to live in Germany for several months during the summer break between my two-year Masters program.  At this point in my life, I had never traveled overseas alone, had never been to Germany, and was only able to string together incredibly basic sentences in the native language.  This was an incredibly formative time for me as the circumstances forced me to step far outside of my comfort zone, ultimately leading to a greater confidence in who I am and what I am capable of doing, and an openness to the possibility of a vocation to the priesthood.  

While I have many great memories from those few months abroad, something that I will never forget is my own limitation in not being able to clearly communicate with those around me. As I said, my familiarity with the German language was almost non-existent, making the experiences of participating in orchestra rehearsals exclusively in German and living with a host family with very little familiarity with the English language often vacillate between being comical and deeply frustrating.  I remember on multiple occasions spending more than 20 minutes trying to mime my way through a conversation with someone which could have been easily communicated within seconds if we both spoke the same language. 

I’m sure that I am not alone in wishing that we had some sort of universal translator or the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that would allow men and women of different languages to communicate with ease no matter where we travel in the world.  The desire to communicate - to be understood and to understand - can obviously take place within conversations within the same language.  We see tempers flare on social media, arguments erupt over family dinners, or two people hearing two very different messages communicated from the same source as the truth of what is trying to be said is obscured by some kind of blinding bias rooted in assumptions or hidden motives.    

I find that expressing love (familial, friendship, romantic, for example) can easily result in misunderstandings or miscommunication.  We may be convinced that love is so simple, shouldn’t it be easy to express it?  Yet when we see the destructive wake of wounded hearts all around us,  it should give us pause and encourage us to step back to see how we may be able to communicate our love for others better.  

Today, I would like to offer three thoughts on how to do just this - communicate our love for others better - for our family, friends, and even romantic pursuits.  

Before we dive into how we can communicate love better, I think that it is important to note that what many people think they are communicating when expressing affection for others is probably not love.  In many cases, we see men and women showering another with praise after praise or gift after gift, not out of love, but (at best) out of a pursuit to feel wanted and (at worst) a manipulative game seeking adoration from others or even sexual release.  Many may inevitably find themselves exhausted or frustrated by unreciprocated affection because what they are communicating is entirely self-serving rather than self-giving.  This can happen in relationships between parents and their children, friends, and when someone pursues a love interest.  

Live in the Truth

If we want to learn to communicate love well, it is absolutely necessary that we take time to discern our intentions and motivations.  Are we telling someone that we love them because we want attention? Are we being guided by infatuation rather than love? Are we making our love conditional, that is, expressing it only when certain behaviors or actions are performed to our liking?

We must take time to discern our interior disposition in order to communicate love well as there  could be many deeply embedded selfish motivations guiding our behavior, ultimately leading to pain for those on the receiving end of our warped notions of love.  These selfish motivations may be the result of immaturity or possibly wounds that we have suffered at the hands of other immature or selfish persons. Regardless of where they originate, it is essential that we take the time to discern if they are guiding us in how we speak to others in love.    

Learn the Right Words

Once we have taken the time to discern if our motivations and intentions are coming from a place of self-gift, we next need to learn the right vocabulary that is needed to express and communicate love well.  

One major problem with how we communicate our love, as I see it, is that we have been formed by a vocabulary of the world rather than by the author of Love itself. In order to communicate love well we must surround ourselves with what love truly is.   The content we regularly consume teaches us how we should speak in love.  Are we consuming a vocabulary rooted in the dignity of each person and the reality that those we interact with are meant to be loved or are we learning words that lead us to hate, distrust, tear apart, manipulate, and use others as objects for our own self-pleasure?

Let us look, rather, to some examples of how a vocabulary rooted in truth sounds:

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.  And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh...

Genesis 2:21-24

In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.  Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

1 John 4:9-12

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 up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends.

1 Corinthians 13:1-8

These are words spoken or written by people who know love and how to communicate what they know.  Example after example can be found in scripture and the writings of the saints to help show us how to express love in a way that inspires hope, frames our responsibility to love within the context of God’s love for us, and recognizes the self-gift that ought to be made when we share our love for others.  The more time we spend learning this language of love, the better equipped we will be when the time comes to share that love with others. Conversely, by learning this vocabulary we can find that it can be a helpful tool of discernment as we learn to live in the truth of what our real motivations and intentions may be in expressing words of love.  

Exercise Prudence

Many have suffered immensely at the hands of immature or self-centered people to the point that walls of self-defense have been erected around their hearts in order to protect themselves from the same thing happening again.  While our intentions may be rooted in goodness and our words may be given to us by the Author of love, it is absolutely essential that we recognize the reality of wounds in our world and exercise proper prudence when wishing to express our love for others.  Many times it may feel as if we are screaming into a hurricane as the words of love seem to get lost in the emotional storms surrounding another person’s heart.   During these moments the worst thing we can do is turn to manipulative tricks of guilt or shame that ultimately lead to self-defeat as we move away from wanting to truly express love for another and instead creep ever closer towards toxic habits that leave everyone in a worse place.  

Wounds take not only time, but also the proper environment in order to heal.  Someone with a deep cut to their arm would find themselves no better (and probably worse off) if they tried to take time healing in a sewer.  Likewise, if we find that someone we are trying to express our love for is suffering from a wounded heart, perhaps one of the best things we can do is not only give them time, but also the environment where healing can take place.  This could be an environment with gentle words of affirmation, simply being present with them in the midst of their pain, or it could even mean giving them the space necessary to process events on their own.  We don’t have to be someone’s savior - we simply need to be a place where they know and can trust that they will be loved.  

Ultimately, the fact that we are trying to be intentional about how we share our love for others goes a lot farther than simply acting on emotions or doing so with selfish motivations.  We will probably make mistakes as we learn to live in the truth, take on the vocabulary of true love, and exercise prudence within the complexities of interpersonal relationships.  Let’s practice mercy as we recognize that we are all in this together - imperfectly expressing our love for one another as we try to build a culture rooted in love, normalizing sharing and expressing words of love for those around us.