Why love?

knowHis.love’s raison d'être comes from the deep desire to give men and women the framework through which their faith, their relationships, and even their understanding of their own self can be understood within the context of the personal love of God.  Without an encounter with and a desire to go ever deeper into this love, we quickly lose sight of who we are and where we are meant to be going.  As John Paul II tells us, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.” 

Oftentimes the need to regularly encounter God’s love is overshadowed by a system of passing on the faith that reduces the experience of God to purely an intellectual exercise of coming to know more about God or a series of bureaucratic hoops to jump through in order to check the appropriate sacramental boxes.  It is no wonder that we continue to see a decline in baptisms, marriages, and funerals in many of our churches - our sacraments and rich intellectual tradition have been divorced from the relational context in which they were meant to take root and grow.  Instead, we see the faith life of many wither and die as little to no coherence can be found within a system of ideas or moral values only nominally rooted in God’s love.  

I was recently speaking with another priest who described his work in helping a young married couple in the midst of serious relational turmoil.  During their conversations, the husband eventually recognized that his inability to know how he ought to be treated within the marriage can be found in his lack of experience with God’s love.  The husband ponders, “how am I supposed to receive or know what is appropriate in marital love if I’ve never experienced the personal love of God?”  

I don’t think that this man is alone, but at least he is starting to recognize the serious foundational deficiencies that, if addressed, could lead to a much happier and direction-filled life.  

I am continually brought back to the need to build a solid foundation in His love, not only because I have seen the fruit of this approach, but also because I also see the deep dissatisfaction of those who are yearning for something more in their life, yet are continually met with the insufficiencies of a faith life or spirituality dependent purely on their own efforts. 

By no means is this tendency new in the Church’s history.  The heresy of Jansenism, for example, greatly distorted the image that people had of God and their relationship to Him.  Why couldn’t a new system of thought relevant to our own age once again do the same thing?  Do we believe that our technological progress has somehow removed our wounded humanity’s tendency to have a warped perception of God, others, and our own self?  There may not be a theological system that inspires the current distrust of God, but by no means does that mean we are somehow free from giving into the lies and patterns of behavior that set our hearts against Him.  

If we want to see not only a halt, but also a reversal to the continuing declining numbers in our institutions, I am certain that we must start with building or rebuilding a foundation rooted in our intentional relationship with God.  This means more than simply running program after program within our parishes, treating the faithful as nothing more than consumers without any real responsibility to be doers and not just hearers of the Good News.   It is time to reject any model that holds our people hostage, abusing their goodwill and wasting their time as we naively believe that simply watching a series of videos without taking the time to enter into people’s lives and walk with them as they journey towards a life with Christ Jesus will somehow do anything to change a culture, let alone any hearts of those within our ministerial reach.  

Learning to love God, others, and ourselves is hard and messy.  It is much easier to stay within the plastic and superficial niceties of a hospitality that avoids discomfort and idolizes my own needs and wants.  If we really want to do what Jesus asks of us, our love for others and ourselves needs to be substantially deeper than mere toleration.  

While it was a message directed at those to be ordained priests, I believe that Pope Benedict XVI’s 2010 homily offers us each a helpful meditation on where we ought to be starting from:

If we go to the beginning of the Gospel passage, we note that Peter's profession is linked to a moment of Prayer: "as he [Jesus] was praying alone the disciples were with him", St Luke says (9: 18).

In other words the disciples become involved in Jesus' absolutely unique being and speaking with the Father. And so it is that they are granted to see the Teacher in his intimate condition as Son, they are granted to see what the others do not see; from "being with him", from "being with him" in prayer, derives a knowledge that goes beyond the people's opinion to reach the profound identity of Jesus, to reach the truth.

Here we are given a very precise instruction for the priest's life and mission: he is called to rediscover in prayer the ever new face of his Lord and the most authentic content of his mission. Only those who have a profound relationship with the Lord are grasped by him, can take him to others, can be sent out. "Abiding with him" must always accompany the exercise of the priestly ministry. It must be its central part, even and above all in difficult moments when it seems that the "things that need doing" should have priority, wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we must always "abide with him".

I believe that bishops and priests can have a very special and essential part to play in helping our Church rediscover the primacy of love as those who have been ordained not only have an obvious practical role within the development and execution of parish, school, and overall institutional renewal, but also spiritually, clergy can lead their communities to an ever-deepening encounter with the living Lord.  

Obviously, the laity are indispensable from this process as well.  Every baptized person shares in the mission of Christ, meaning that every baptized person has a responsibility to “rediscover in prayer the ever new face of his Lord and the most authentic content of his mission.”  We see an essential co-responsibility for both the ordained and the laity to first “abide with him” before anything else.  Before starting any program - before establishing any kind of vision - we must abide with him.  This isn’t something that we do once or even every once in a while; rather, abiding in His love becomes the source of our every action.  Yes - we can spend time in solitude with our Lord, but it is equally important to abide in His love together.  

Sainthood doesn’t happen in isolation.  Growing closer to the Lord in prayer together clarifies our mission and animates our activity in a way that could be expected by relying solely on our own talents and abilities.  Priests praying together, priests praying with families, families praying with other families, and the entire parish learning to be a school of prayer will inevitably break down any walls of pride or self-sufficient tendencies that do nothing but get in the way of living out the mission entrusted to us by Christ.  The early Church lived this way (Acts 2:42) and I am certain that when explosions of faith happened throughout the last 2000 years, it was found in people praying together.  

I was originally going to write today’s article on shame (a topic that I will definitely cover in the future), but my heart was genuinely moved to once again dive into the need to focus on the primacy of love.  If we do not start examining our institutions by the standard of relationship with God and everything that flows from that relationship, we shouldn’t be surprised with a further need to close, cluster, and downsize.  Far from being a sort of “magic bullet” that will easily solve all problems in the Church, building or rebuilding from a foundation of love will not be easy.  Fortunately, this love isn’t something that we have to create out of thin air, we simply need to learn to say “yes” and then learn to say “yes” again and again as long as we have breath in our bodies.