Crazy Messy Humanity

On the one hand we find ourselves before a strictly metaphysical image of God: 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. Eros is thus supremely ennobled, yet at the same time it is so purified as to become one with agape.

We can thus see how the reception of the Song of Songs in the canon of sacred Scripture was soon explained by the idea that these love songs ultimately describe God's relation to man and man's relation to God. Thus the Song of Songs became, both in Christian and Jewish literature, a source of mystical knowledge and experience, an expression of the essence of biblical faith: that man can indeed enter into union with God—his primordial aspiration. But this union is no mere fusion, a sinking in the nameless ocean of the Divine; it is a unity which creates love, a unity in which both God and man remain themselves and yet become fully one. As Saint Paul says: “He who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor 6:17).

Deus Caritas Est

Reflection -  Well, my weeks of family ministry are over for the year, now that I have completed both my Cana Colony week and Nazareth week. I always look forward to this time of the year and that particular variety of priestly ministry. Besides being a lot of fun, I have a great love for families and children and the whole messy, maddening, massively difficult vocation of marriage and family life.

I think marriage, for me as a celibate, points me to something very deep about God and the whole reality of God and man, this strange messy, maddening, massively difficult reality of Life itself and how God and we are wrapped up together in this mystery. God is love; God loves us; God unites himself to us in love.

How easy it is to say all these things. How clichéd they become, how trite. But the reality of it is anything but. At the heart of reality, the heart of humanity, the heart of life, is the fact that we are made for a relationship, that this Other stands before us, above us, all about us, and beckons us out of ourselves into a passionate love affair, not with this woman or that man, but with the God of gods, the Lord of lords, the maker of heaven and earth.

The image of marriage then, and its lived out messy reality, is central to the whole meaning and point and purpose and essential reality of my life as a celibate and every human beings life as a person. God summons us out of ourselves and towards Him, and in this summoning there is union, the two do become one flesh, one heart, one mind, and out of that union does come a bliss beside which sexual consummation is small, and a fruitfulness beside which the begetting of a hundred children pales in comparison.

And of course this bliss and this fruitfulness is what every human being, married, celibate, single, is called to, although we who are consecrated to celibacy are invited to make this a visible concrete reality in our whole way of life.

But the point is not celibacy—the point is God! God’s love, God’s passion, and God’s action in taking us to Himself—this is the great mystery of humanity. It is a mystery we will not fully grasp (or perhaps even grasp much at all) until we see Him in heaven. But it is there nonetheless.

The strange and beautiful aspect for me is that the married couples I know who are trying to live a faithful Catholic marriage embody this mystery in a very nitty-gritty way. All the dirty diapers from babies and dirty looks from teenagers, all the toil of inter-marital communication—the call to forgiveness, to understanding, to listening, all the endless routine of household work and financial stress, all the constant, ceaseless, overwhelming demands that require you to forget yourself and serve the other(s), to put everyone else’s needs before your own—all of this reveals something so very deep about God, about Christ, and about the human vocation.

It is beautiful, and that’s why I love families so much, in all their crazy messy humanity. So I heave a sigh of regret at being done with family camp ministry for another year, and plunge back today into my own version of crazy messy humanity in the MH community of love. Talk to you all again tomorrow.

This Strange Passionate Mercy

We have seen that God's eros for man is also totally agape. This is not only because it is bestowed in a completely gratuitous manner, without any previous merit, but also because it is love which forgives. Hosea above all shows us that this agape dimension of God's love for man goes far beyond the aspect of gratuity. Israel has committed “adultery” and has broken the covenant; God should judge and repudiate her. It is precisely at this point that God is revealed to be God and not man: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! ... My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst” (Hos 11:8-9). God's passionate love for his people—for humanity—is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice. Here Christians can see a dim prefigurement of the mystery of the Cross: so great is God's love for man that by becoming man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.

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Reflection – Powerful words here. Hosea is a powerful prophet, and the Pope’s meditation on Hosea takes him to a powerful place. God’s love so great ‘that it turns God against himself’ – this is a powerful image.

It seems to me that all of our lives spring from this, whether we know it or not. The initial reality of God’s creating love, out of which comes His choice to make you and me in the first place. And then, as we all fall into some form of adultery, some type of running after other gods and other goods, some breaking of the covenant, this strange passionate mercy which comes after us, descends upon us, blazes around us.

This is the foundational experience of faith. Experience is a loaded word, I realize. I don’t suggest that everyone has a mystical experience before they come to believe (clearly, not), or some kind of big emotional high or something. But there is something… perhaps in the quiet hidden depths of the soul, or in the outward concreteness of the confessional or the altar. Something, some way in which our poverty, brokenness and sin is… met. God’s love, and His passionate flaming mercy, and from this we can build our lives in and with Him.

What is revealed in this Hosea passage is indeed so very strange. God’s heart recoiling within his breast, God seemingly at war with Himself. Imagery, poetry, anthropomorphism? Well, OK, but even so, this is a true revelation of God here. Pope Benedict is right to see in this something that will only become clear in the death of Christ on the Cross. God’s love which is so powerful and overwhelming, so all-encompassing that it brings Him from heaven to earth and down into the pit of hell, even. Death itself is not too far to go for the living God and his love for us.

God is un-godded by his love for us, in a sense. That is, the strict separation between God and man, which on our part is so important to maintain out of reverence and proper humility, He has no problem in bridging. God’s love and mercy is so utterly utter—this strange passionate mercy—that He does ‘ungodly’ things like suffer and die and descend to hell for us. And so we come to know in this ‘ungodly God’ (paradox alert!) the true depths of who God in fact is.

Oh the depths of God, the unfathomable depths of his mercy and love! We will spend all eternity plumbing those depths and plummeting into them. Here and now, they provide for us the only sure foundation on which to build our lives, the only true and solid rock on which the house of humanity sits secure.

The Limits of Agape

Eros and agape—ascending love and descending love—can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized. Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to “be there for” the other. The element of agape thus enters into this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature. On the other hand, man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow (cf. Jn 7:37-38). Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God (cf. Jn 19:34).

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Reflection – So we continue our reflection on love, on the two loves of eros and agape and how they relate to each other.

Yesterday I wrote quite a bit about the tragedy of eros when it is cut off from agape, especially in the current crisis of epidemic pornography. The Pope refers to this here: how eros only remains itself as it is met by and grows and deepens into agape.

He goes on, though, to show that agape alone is not enough. Our own commitment to agape has its limits. To live a life of selfless love requires receiving selfless love from another. To be a shepherd we must be shepherded ourselves, must be that sheep carried on the shoulders of the Good Shepherd.

To care we must be cared for, and to love, really love, we must first be loved. All of this points to the basic need of the human person for prayer, for worship, for sacramental gift, for spiritual food. No matter how ‘good’ you may be (and I don’t mean that sarcastically – there is genuine goodness in the world!), you do need to drink from the source of goodness which is Jesus Christ.

This is one of those areas of spiritual peril that ‘good people’ are especially prone to encounter. When you have heavy responsibilities, many people seeking your time and energy, and a fundamental disposition to be of service to God and neighbour, the first thing to get crossed off the list generally is prayer time or other forms of spiritual refreshment.

The mother with a house full of kids, the priest covering three or four parishes, the father working long hours to support his family, the child caring for his or her aging parents—all of this can eat up every minute of waking life.

This is both difficult and dangerous. Bitterness of spirit can enter in, or cynicism; faith can be weakened to the point of extinction; joy and peace can flee. ‘Man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive.’ We have to look for the possibilities in our own lives – clearly general advice cannot be given here, as everyone’s circumstances are so different.

We cannot give what we do not have—if love is not filling you, you will run out of love sooner or later, and probably sooner. If any of this is resonating with you, but you’re really not sure how or what you can change in your life to be ‘filled’ a bit more regularly, ask the Holy Spirit to show you. God must want to come to each one of us to give us what we need, right? So there must be a way in your life, in my life, in every human being’s life where He can do just that. So be simple and childlike and ask Him, that’s all.

The Tragedy of Eros

We began [this encyclical] by asking whether the different, or even opposed, meanings of the word “love” point to some profound underlying unity, or whether on the contrary they must remain unconnected, one alongside the other. More significantly, though, we questioned whether the message of love proclaimed to us by the Bible and the Church's Tradition has some points of contact with the common human experience of love, or whether it is opposed to that experience.

This in turn led us to consider two fundamental words: eros, as a term to indicate “worldly” love and agape, referring to love grounded in and shaped by faith. The two notions are often contrasted as “ascending” love and “descending” love. There are other, similar classifications, such as the distinction between possessive love and oblative love (amor concupiscentiae – amor benevolentiae), to which is sometimes also added love that seeks its own advantage.

In philosophical and theological debate, these distinctions have often been radicalized to the point of establishing a clear antithesis between them: descending, oblative love—agape—would be typically Christian, while on the other hand ascending, possessive or covetous love —eros—would be typical of non-Christian, and particularly Greek culture. Were this antithesis to be taken to extremes, the essence of Christianity would be detached from the vital relations fundamental to human existence, and would become a world apart, admirable perhaps, but decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life.

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Reflection – Well, it’s been quite awhile since we’ve visited this encyclical on this blog. The passage cited here picks up its themes admirably, and tomorrow we will continue those themes.

Eros and agape. The Pope has earlier made clear that by eros he does not simply or even primarily mean sexual attraction, although the English word ‘erotic’ means precisely that. It’s much broader in Greek—the whole experience of love as desire, as longing, as the will to possess and be united with the beloved. Sex, yes, but clearly more than that. There can be eros for knowledge, for all manner of worldly goods, and even a proper eros for God. At times religion is spoken of as sublimated sexuality, as a pathology emerging from repression even, but it is just as likely and maybe more so that disordered sexuality is sublimated religion. ‘A man entering a brothel is looking for God,’ saith Chesterton. We could well update this to ‘A man surfing the internet for pornography is looking for God’.

The Pope takes great pains in this encyclical to show exactly how eros and agape are related; how the human reality of desire in all its forms is met by, completed by the love that comes from God who is perfect and desires nothing from us.

I’m struck by the tragedy of eros cut off from agape, symbolized by the epidemic of pornography today. The love of desire is meant to blossom into a genuine love of the person. What begins as a basically chemically driven, primitive selection and movement towards the other is meant to grow towards a genuine inter-personal relationship. What begins with hormones is meant to end with commitment, with self-gift. What begins with attraction and delight is meant to end with sacrifice.

When eros and agape get separated, while agape can become a bit frosty and lofty, eros has an even more calamitous fate, disintegrating into lust, into a fruitless, futile, demonic parody of itself. And this is the tragic situation of countless men today.

Casanova conquered his thousands of women but he did not know a single one of them, and he emerges a tragic and pathetic figure. How much more pathetic and tragic are the millions of cyber-Casanovas with hundreds of thousands of digitized women available at the click of a mouse… yet knowing none of them, going nowhere, eros utterly frustrated from its true end of agape, desire sundered from relationship, commitment, and sacrifice.

It is a human, psychological, spiritual crisis of (if I may wax dramatic) civilizational proportions, a rot that strikes at the very heart of essential human realities, our capacity to love maturely and well, to grow into the fullness of love and gift. There is much questioning today of ‘what’s wrong with the men?’ A sense is widely afoot that something has gone very badly awry in the male of the species. I believe that the tragedy of eros cut off from agape is at the heart of this problem, and until society effectively addresses this tragedy and the epidemic of pornography that is its cause and effect, we will continue to flounder. And that’s enough for one day!

Overthrowing the Citadel

Saint Paul says, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:17). Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own.

Communion draws me out of myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians. We become “one body”, completely joined in a single existence. Love of God and love of neighbour are now truly united: God incarnate draws us all to himself. We can thus understand how agape also became a term for the Eucharist: there God's own agape comes to us bodily, in order to continue his work in us and through us.

Only by keeping in mind this Christological and sacramental basis can we correctly understand Jesus' teaching on love. The transition which he makes from the Law and the Prophets to the twofold commandment of love of God and of neighbour, and his grounding the whole life of faith on this central precept, is not simply a matter of morality—something that could exist apart from and alongside faith in Christ and its sacramental re-actualization.

Faith, worship and ethos are interwoven as a single reality which takes shape in our encounter with God's agape. Here the usual contraposition between worship and ethics simply falls apart. “Worship” itself, Eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented.

Deus Caritas Est 14,

Reflection – I am writing this from the parish rectory in Fort Coulonge, Quebec (where??), my home base while I give parish missions in nearby parishes of Vinton and Otter Lake (where????). My theme for the mission is “Living the Eucharist” – looking at the Mass as teaching us how to live, giving us a pattern for our lives.

Well, this quote from Deus Caritas Est just about sums up everything I have to say on the subject! In the Mass, Jesus pours out his whole being for us in love and gift; in our lives we are to pour out our whole being for one another in love and gift. In the Mass, Jesus gives us His very self to be our food and drink, our strength and our life; in our lives, we can only be true to the Eucharist we celebrate by living and loving as Jesus does, and this power is in us because He is in us, because of the Mass.

It is the whole business of being drawn out of ourselves, of having the citadel of the self, the ego, be overthrown. This is the purpose of Lent, right? On a certain fundamental level? And here it is at the Mass. A good Lenten observance if you can do it: go to Mass every day. Right there is the whole meaning and substance of life opened up for us, drawing us in, giving us what we need to live it out in our lives. And that whole meaning and substance is ‘love’.

Being loved and loving others in return: this is ‘living the Eucharist’.

The Essence of Christianity

Here we see the necessary interplay between love of God and love of neighbour which the First Letter of John speaks of with such insistence. If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God. But if in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be “devout” and to perform my “religious duties”, then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely “proper”, but loveless. Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbour can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me. The saints—consider the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta—constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbour from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter acquired its realism and depth in their service to others. Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a “commandment” imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love. Love is “divine” because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a “we” which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).

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Reflection – The Pope here has been exploring the question of how love can be ‘commanded’ – how is it possible that a feeling in the depths of one’s heart can be commanded by an external law? We know it is so: ‘a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you’ (John 13:34). But how are we to obey this commandment?

The answer he gives in this passage is so perfect, but expressed so simply and briefly, that we can miss it. And it really penetrates to the very heart of the Christian faith, to what our deepest understanding is of this strange religion God has inducted us into, this strange Way that God has opened for humanity.

Essentially, the Law of the Christian is not a set of rules, a list of prohibitions, a bunch of dos and don’ts. These exist, but they are not our law.

Our law is Jesus Christ. And the obedience to this law is this deep personal relationship with Jesus Christ that He calls each of us to enter. We cannot simply draw up a list of all the things Jesus tells us to do, and the somewhat shorter list of things he tells us not to do, and then say ‘This is our Christian Torah! Here’s the Law of the Gospel’.

Well, we could do it, but it would be ridiculous and impossible and we would end up looking very stupid. Not recommended.

What we are called to on every page of the Gospel is not to simply substitute a bunch of new commandments for the old ones of Moses, but to plunge into a depth of relationship with Jesus that is truly transformative. To turn to Him each day and cry out, “Lord, that I may love as you love! That I may love as you love! Have mercy on me, Jesus! Increase my love!” That’s the law of the Christian.

And out of this constant transforming encounter, which is not a once and for all affair, but must be renewed daily, and indeed moment by moment if we’re really going to do it, well then of course we will not fornicate, or seek revenge, or hate. Of course we will go the extra mile, be indifferent to possessions, share generously with the poor. Of course we will listen to the Church and allow our minds and hearts to be formed by its teachings. Of course we will pray constantly and fast and give alms.

Not because there is some list of rules, and a big man with a whip threatening us, or eternal fires of Hell threatening us. No! We will ‘of course’ do all this because Christ is coming to us moment by moment and changing our hearts so that we want to do it, even when we ‘don’t want’ to do it!

Our Law is Jesus, this Law is given to us by the Father, and is being promulgated in our hearts by the Holy Spirit moment by moment, who gives us the power to live it as He teaches it to us. And this is the very substance and essence of Christian life in the world.

Pretty good religion we got, eh?

The Way of God

Love of neighbour is [indeed] possible in the way proclaimed by the Bible, by Jesus. It consists in the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know. This can only take place on the basis of an intimate encounter with God, an encounter which has become a communion of will, even affecting my feelings. Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend. Going beyond exterior appearances, I perceive in others an interior desire for a sign of love, of concern. This I can offer them not only through the organizations intended for such purposes, accepting it perhaps as a political necessity. Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave.

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Reflection – I don’t know—is it possible?—that some of the readers of this blog have ever had the experience of finding it difficult to love a certain person? Is it just within the realm of possibility that any of you have ever encountered that particular problem?

Yes, once in a while it has been known that we meet a person who annoys, irks, repels, disgusts, enrages us. This is actually, of course, a fairly common human situation.

The wisdom of the world says, in those cases, ‘well, to Hell with them, then!’ Love those who love you, or love those who you like, and forget the rest of them.

This is not the wisdom of the Gospels. This is not the way of God. And we have to choose. Do we belong to the world, or to God? Who are we following?

To love those we dislike is a work. It doesn’t just happen. And this work is a matter of, as the Pope says, drawing closer to Christ. This intimate encounter with God, this crying out to the Lord: “That I may love this person! That I may see them as you see them! Have mercy on me, Jesus!”

This is the love that transforms our own hearts into a fire of love. This is the love that provides warmth and light for the world. Without this kind of love, this kind of movement towards God, we are just one more bunch of worldly people—nice, maybe, but nothing special.

God wants us to be fire and light in the world. And the quickest way to that fire and light is to commit ourselves to loving in difficult circumstances, with all the prayer and struggle that entails for us.

It’s our choice, but on that choice hangs a great deal. Will we shine the light of the Gospel into the world, or will we be part of the world’s darkness? Catherine Doherty puts it well: “The day you no longer burn with love many will die of the cold.”

The Way of Love in the World

Can we love God without seeing him? And can love be commanded? Against the double commandment of love these questions raise a double objection. No one has ever seen God, so how could we love him? Moreover, love cannot be commanded; it is ultimately a feeling that is either there or not, nor can it be produced by the will. Scripture seems to reinforce the first objection when it states: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 Jn 4:20). But this text hardly excludes the love of God as something impossible. On the contrary, the whole context of the passage quoted shows that such love is explicitly demanded. The unbreakable bond between love of God and love of neighbour is emphasized. One is so closely connected to the other that to say that we love God becomes a lie if we are closed to our neighbour or hate him altogether. Saint John's words should rather be interpreted to mean that love of neighbour is a path that leads to the encounter with God, and that closing our eyes to our neighbour also blinds us to God.

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Reflection – I have already blogged about the next paragraph of the encyclical, where the Pope addresses the question of love being ‘commanded.’ Here, he tackles briefly the thorny question of the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour.

Personally, I have always found one of the most challenging, confronting sentences to be something the Lord said to St. Catherine of Siena, to the effect that “The degree to which you love the person you love least in the world is the degree to which you love Me.” That’s something to ponder.

Of course, it’s not a complicated matter. God created everyone. God loves everything He created. To love God is to love what He loves. Therefore our love of God (that mysterious commodity) can be ‘gauged’ by our love of what He loves.

But what this simple little syllogism does to us is immense. It plunges us into the passion of faith, into the crucifixion of our emotions, into battle with the world, the flesh, the devil. When we really get that our very communion with God which is the very essence and substance of life for us, is bound up with how we treat that obnoxious co-worker, that malicious relative, that person who swindled/lied/cheated/abused us… well, this may be simple, but it sure ain’t easy.

But it’s a passion of faith we must enter. God is waiting for us in the midst of that struggle. God is offering us, at the heart of these most painful encounters when everything in us cries out ‘Strike back! Don’t take that! Don’t let him do that! Don’t let her get away with that!’—God offers us, in the midst of all that, Himself. An intimate sharing with his own life, his own way of love in the world.

If we refuse, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to Hell, necessarily. But it does mean we are distancing ourselves from God. It does mean that we are choosing not to become saints. It does mean that we are choosing to not burn with love in the world, and the world is so very cold right now, you know. So many people are shivering and freezing because so few people are willing to burn with love of God and neighbour.

Well, it’s up to each one of us. No one can make me love; no one can make you love. But it seems to me that this is the way of it – we choose the path of universal love, with all the struggle and anguish it entails, or we choose the path of least resistance, loving those we like, loving when we feel like it, and meanwhile returning slap for slap and insult for insult. Perhaps not a wicked way of living, but also not a way of living that makes much difference in the world.

If we want to make a difference in the world, we have to meet God in the battlefield of love, where his love sets our hearts on fire, and our hearts on fire pour out towards everyone, without exception, loving with out counting the cost and clinging fiercely to God in the midst of it all.

The Soup Kitchen of the World

Jesus gave this act of oblation an enduring presence through his institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. He anticipated his death and resurrection by giving his disciples, in the bread and wine, his very self, his body and blood as the new manna (cf. Jn 6:31-33). The ancient world had dimly perceived that man's real food—what truly nourishes him as man—is ultimately the Logos, eternal wisdom: this same Logos now truly becomes food for us—as love. The Eucharist draws us into Jesus' act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving. The imagery of marriage between God and Israel is now realized in a way previously inconceivable: it had meant standing in God's presence, but now it becomes union with God through sharing in Jesus' self-gift, sharing in his body and blood. The sacramental “mysticism”, grounded in God's condescension towards us, operates at a radically different level and lifts us to far greater heights than anything that any human mystical elevation could ever accomplish.

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Reflection – After yesterday’s political post, it is good today to ground ourselves back into the depth of reality. Politics come and go: love abides forever. And love, only because of what Jesus did and revealed to us, is not sentiment or physical urge, not vague benevolence or kindly feelings. It is bread and wine, food and drink.

It is as real, as concrete as a slap in the face (but better than that, somehow!). Love is not something ‘out there’, something hidden in some recess of God that we have to spend our life searching for. Love is not a scarcity commodity that we have to scramble for and wrestle away from others for ourselves.

Love is not something we have to be so desperate to get that we do terrible things to get it, prostituting ourselves out for little crumbs of love (as so many young girls and women do, if I can put it rather bluntly), or plunging into every internet brothel and x-rated site we can find to satisfy that urge for love in a pale and shoddy physical substitute for it (as so many young men do).

Love is bread and wine, food and drink. Love pours itself out upon us from every altar, every tabernacle, every Mass. There is no shortage of love; God’s love is poured out upon all, all the time. We just have to receive it.

But what is this reception? Yes, there is the mere fact of being a practicing Catholic and receiving the Eucharist, and this is no small thing.

But it seems to me that, if this reception of the Eucharist is to be understood and known by us as the reception of every bit of God’s love, the whole of Love Itself poured into our souls with every reception of holy communion, we have to be living in a certain way.

It is this ‘wisdom’ that the Pope talks about. Wisdom in the Biblical tradition is not esoteric knowledge or speculative intellectualizing. It is practical: how are we to live? What are we supposed to do? Hokmah (Hebrew) or Sophia (Greek) is what tells us how to live a good life.

So this Eucharist which is food and drink, which is God’s love poured out, is also Wisdom. It tells us how to live. In other words, if you want your hunger of love to be filled, love. If you want to know yourself to be loved by God in a total, unconditional, free, life-giving, all-embracing way, then at least start to love that way yourself, at least a bit, as much as you can. Pour yourself into the task of love in the world, and then turn to God to receive His love as food and drink. Empty yourself out, and then show up at the great Soup Kitchen of the world, the Mass, with your beggar’s bowl to be filled up.

That’s all there is to it! Simple, huh? It hurts like blazes to live like this, and pushes us beyond anything we can imagine, but it is the only way to live in the precincts of love and gift, the only way to be really and truly filled with everything we hunger for.

It’s the only way to be happy.

Calumny and Lies (I Tell You!)

In the gradual unfolding of this encounter [with God], it is clearly revealed that love is not merely a sentiment. Sentiments come and go. A sentiment can be a marvellous first spark, but it is not the fullness of love. Earlier we spoke of the process of purification and maturation by which eros comes fully into its own, becomes love in the full meaning of the word. It is characteristic of mature love that it calls into play all man's potentialities; it engages the whole man, so to speak. Contact with the visible manifestations of God's love can awaken within us a feeling of joy born of the experience of being loved. But this encounter also engages our will and our intellect. Acknowledgment of the living God is one path towards love, and the “yes” of our will to his will unites our intellect, will and sentiments in the all-embracing act of love. But this process is always open-ended; love is never “finished” and complete; throughout life, it changes and matures, and thus remains faithful to itself. Idem velle atque idem nolle—to want the same thing, and to reject the same thing—was recognized by antiquity as the authentic content of love: the one becomes similar to the other, and this leads to a community of will and thought. The love-story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God's will increasingly coincide: God's will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself. Then self- abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy (cf. Ps 73 [72]:23-28).

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Reflection – Well, I’ve been at this blogging thing for over six months now, and just over 200 posts, which means I’ve been pretty much having a daily encounter with the writings of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict all that time, not to mention the year I spent immersed in his writings doing my thesis on his Marian writings.

So when I run across a passage like the above one, it is all the more astonishing how utterly astonished I am at this man, his clarity, wisdom, profundity, simplicity… I mean, the above passage clearly, briefly, beautifully and with a stunning depth of insight explains what it means to love God, and from that, what the very nature of love itself is. I hardly want to say anything about it – it’s just there, folks. Read it, meditate on it, take it to prayer. This is the path of love.

And this is what humanity is crying out for, underneath all our other cries and anguish. “I wanna know what love is (whoa whoa),” as the power ballad of my youth bellowed. Well, here’s what love is, this and nothing else. The rest is mere sentiment and hormones, which are not wrong (God made our bodies and emotions after all) but are not sufficient to see us through life.

This is why one of the few things that really gets my Gallic temper up is the persistent character assassination of Ratzinger/Benedict in the mass media, which deters so many people from reading him. He writes simply, clearly, and deeply, with a great understanding of the modern world and its struggles, and with a tremendous ability to show the modern world the path of Christ and the Gospel.

Because—and here comes my Gallic temper!—there have been lies upon lies told about this man by powerful people who shape the public perception, so many people will not read him, dismiss him, reflexively scoff at him. It is evil, and I for one don’t believe it’s entirely accidental. The one writer who in a simple, accessible, and authoritative way presents the path of Christ and the Gospel to modern people, who writes in a way that any reasonably literate person can follow his thought, has had his reputation blackened by calumny and lies (calumny and lies, I tell you!!!!!). As the church lady from Saturday Night Live used to say, I wonder who could be behind that? Could it be…. (if you don’t know the punchline, Google it!)

So that’s why I’m blogging – Ratzinger/Benedict has the vision, the answer, the Gospel proclamation we need today. He is able to tell us what love looks like, the beauty of truth and the splendour of goodness, the freedom that comes from obeying the moral law, the dignity of the human person in the light of Christ—everything our poor battered world needs so badly.

Read him. Encourage others to read him. It’s really important.

(OK, I’m done ranting now…)

That's All, Folks

True, no one has ever seen God as he is. And yet God is not totally invisible to us; he does not remain completely inaccessible. God loved us first (1 Jn 4:10), and this love of God has appeared in our midst. He has become visible in as much as he “has sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 Jn 4:9). God has made himself visible: in Jesus we are able to see the Father (cf. Jn 14:9). Indeed, God is visible in a number of ways. In the love-story recounted by the Bible, he comes towards us, he seeks to win our hearts, all the way to the Last Supper, to the piercing of his heart on the Cross, to his appearances after the Resurrection and to the great deeds by which, through the activity of the Apostles, he guided the nascent Church along its path. Nor has the Lord been absent from subsequent Church history: he encounters us ever anew, in the men and women who reflect his presence, in his word, in the sacraments, and especially in the Eucharist. In the Church's Liturgy, in her prayer, in the living community of believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive his presence and we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives. He has loved us first and he continues to do so; we too, then, can respond with love. God does not demand of us a feeling which we ourselves are incapable of producing. He loves us, he makes us see and experience his love, and since he has “loved us first”, love can also blossom as a response within us.

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Reflection – How are we to love? For some this question is more acute and painful than for others. Some people have a certain reservoir of what appears to be ‘natural’ love – a predisposition to like most people, a generally positive view of life and humanity, an easy-going temperament, a natural affection.

Others lack this, and struggle mightily to ‘play well with others’ as the saying goes. But for everyone, as the true nature of love, its demands, its cost unfolds itself through our lives, the question becomes acute. How are we to love as we have been commanded to do?
The answer of the Bible, which is the answer of the Pope in this paragraph of the encyclical, and was also one of Catherine Doherty’s favourite quotes is that God loves us first, and his love is meant to become our love.
This means that the first business of life is to live in such a way that we are available to receive God’s love. Without His love we cannot love as we should, and are condemned either to superficial ‘good relationships’ which may be pleasant but don’t really take us anywhere, or to perpetual struggle, conflict, and warfare with the rest of humanity, which takes us somewhere, all right—into deep loneliness and isolation if they are unchecked.
In talking about where we are to go to receive God’s love, the Pope significantly highlights the life of the Church. It is there that: “he encounters us ever anew, in the men and women who reflect his presence, in his word, in the sacraments, and especially in the Eucharist. In the Church's Liturgy, in her prayer, in the living community of believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive his presence and we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives”
As we begin today another stretch of ‘ordinary’ time, it is good to reflect on the most basic basics of life. We are to love one another as Christ loves us; this is impossible for us unless Christ is giving us his life; Christ gives us his life through the ministry of the Church. As Porky Pig was wont to say, ‘b’dee, b’dee, b’dee that’s all folks!’
But let’s not kid ourselves. We cannot drift through life just being nice, getting along, playing well with others. The world needs something more from us than that, and it doesn’t really work anyhow, in terms of making us happy.
It’s not complicated, the path that God in Christ has laid out for us in his Church. Not easy, but not complicated. Go to Church, say your prayers, receive the grace of the sacraments, and knock yourself out every day of your life loving and serving and giving to everyone as you are able. That’s all, folks.

The Heart of the Matter

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny. In the same verse, Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us”.

We have come to believe in God's love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. Saint John's Gospel describes that event in these words: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should ... have eternal life” (3:16). In acknowledging the centrality of love, Christian faith has retained the core of Israel's faith, while at the same time giving it new depth and breadth. The pious Jew prayed daily the words of the Book of Deuteronomy which expressed the heart of his existence: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might” (6:4-5). Jesus united into a single precept this commandment of love for God and the commandment of love for neighbour found in the Book of Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (19:18; cf. Mk 12:29-31). Since God has first loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10), love is now no longer a mere “command”; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us.

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Reflection – Do you know and believe in God’s love for you? Do I? It really is the central matter, you know. All the sound theology, all the ritual observance, all the moral wisdom of the Church (all of which I accept and rejoice in unconditionally), if they lack the central knowledge of God’s immeasurable, personal love for you, for me, for the lady down the street, the young punk on the subway, the obnoxious co-worker, the trying in-laws, for the corrupt politician, the abortionist, the pedophile—if it is lacking that knowledge, that deep knowledge, then all the other stuff is missing its central heart, its core, its life principle.

Theology without love becomes a dead formal system; liturgy without love becomes empty gestures; morality without love becomes the tight-lipped prudishness of the Pharisee. It is the living encounter with God in Christ that gives life and freshness and vibrancy to all the rest of it; without that, everything withers and fades.

The love of God is indeed the central and urgent question of life. But many people would, in fact, hesitate to answer yes to the above question, ‘do you know and believe in God’s love for yourself?’ What are we to do? How are we to come to this knowledge?

Prayer really is the place we come to this, prayer and meditation on the Word of God, particularly the Gospels. Asking the Holy Spirit to teach us; contemplating the face of Christ revealed to us in the Word; repeating the name of Jesus frequently in our hearts: Jesus, have mercy on me, Jesus, I trust you, Jesus, I thank you, Jesus, I love you.

It is here, and in all this, that we are ‘mysteriously visited’, in the words of Paul Evdokimov. And it is out of this knowledge of God’s love, personally poured out for me, that I come to know his love for everyone, especially for those I may not love much, for those I dislike or be inclined to have contempt for. And out of knowing God’s love for me, I can begin to love my neighbour. And this is how we transform our world—letting God’s love fill us, so we have an inexhaustible store of love to share with everyone else.

It really is the heart of the matter.

I Am Not a Sphere

The first novelty of biblical faith consists, as we have seen, in its image of God. The second, essentially connected to this, is found in the image of man. The biblical account of creation speaks of the solitude of Adam, the first man, and God's decision to give him a helper. Of all other creatures, not one is capable of being the helper that man needs, even though he has assigned a name to all the wild beasts and birds and thus made them fully a part of his life. So God forms woman from the rib of man. Now Adam finds the helper that he needed: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). Here one might detect hints of ideas that are also found, for example, in the myth mentioned by Plato, according to which man was originally spherical, because he was complete in himself and self-sufficient. But as a punishment for pride, he was split in two by Zeus, so that now he longs for his other half, striving with all his being to possess it and thus regain his integrity. While the biblical narrative does not speak of punishment, the idea is certainly present that man is somehow incomplete, driven by nature to seek in another the part that can make him whole, the idea that only in communion with the opposite sex can he become “complete”. The biblical account thus concludes with a prophecy about Adam: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:24).

Two aspects of this are important. First, eros is somehow rooted in man's very nature; Adam is a seeker, who “abandons his mother and father” in order to find woman; only together do the two represent complete humanity and become “one flesh”. The second aspect is equally important. From the standpoint of creation, eros directs man towards marriage, to a bond which is unique and definitive; thus, and only thus, does it fulfil its deepest purpose. Corresponding to the image of a monotheistic God is monogamous marriage. Marriage based on exclusive and definitive love becomes the icon of the relationship between God and his people and vice versa. God's way of loving becomes the measure of human love. This close connection between eros and marriage in the Bible has practically no equivalent in extra-biblical literature.

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Reflection – First, I have to say that I’ve always been deeply amused at Plato’s idea that the original perfect design of humanity is to be spherical! As I get older and struggle with just how easy it is to gain weight as the metabolism slows down, it is a consolation to know that I am actually approaching the Greek ideal of human perfection in my ‘well-rounded’ character.

Of course, Plato’s deep point is the idea that human perfection is to be understood as human self-sufficiency, and a circle being a self-contained shape turning in on itself at every point is the image of this perfect self-enclosed reality.

What a difference the Biblical revelation makes! No longer is dependence or incompleteness seen as a punishment, a flaw, a breakdown somewhere. Rather, our perfection comes not in being perfectly self-sufficient, but perfectly in communion. Our dependence, our orientation towards the other, the deep sense of incompletion so long as we are not united to the other, which in our very bodies is realized in the dynamic of heterosexual attraction, and in our whole person is expressed in the vocation of marriage—this is a deep revelation of God’s image expressed in human flesh.

Marriage reveals this not only to those who are called to the vocation of marriage. I believe that each vocation has a prophetic dimension, revealing something that is common to the whole body of humanity in its specific form of life. All human beings are called to find in their ‘hunger’, their incompleteness, a call not to clutch and grab and be selfish, but to give themselves, to abandon themselves body and soul to whatever mission, task, vocation they are led to, and to above all turn that longing towards God Himself, the fulfillment of all our desires, and the Bridegroom of all humanity.

Unpredictable, Unprecedented, and Dramatic

The real novelty of the New Testament lies not so much in new ideas as in the figure of Christ himself, who gives flesh and blood to those concepts—an unprecedented realism. In the Old Testament, the novelty of the Bible did not consist merely in abstract notions but in God's unpredictable and in some sense unprecedented activity. This divine activity now takes on dramatic form when, in Jesus Christ, it is God himself who goes in search of the “stray sheep”, a suffering and lost humanity. When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who looks for the lost coin, of the father who goes to meet and embrace his prodigal son, these are no mere words: they constitute an explanation of his very being and activity. His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form. By contemplating the pierced side of Christ (cf. 19:37), we can understand the starting-point of this Encyclical Letter: “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). It is there that this truth can be contemplated. It is from there that our definition of love must begin. In this contemplation the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move.

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Reflection – This passage from Pope Benedict’s first encyclical follows in a natural and beautiful way from the one cited in the previous post. The path of love, the mystery of love, the challenge and call to love—all of this only gets translated from either the realm of theory (let me draw you a schematic diagram of love!) or of lofty ideal (oh, wouldn’t it be nice if we could live like that… sigh) when we come into a relationship with Love Itself, which is not an idea or an ideal, but a person.

And this person cannot be someone who lived a very long time ago and who we read about it a nice book encrusted with jewels and gold leaf. He has to be someone real who we can meet somehow, somewhere, and truly draw life from. And so we have the Eucharist, which in a most literal and almost shockingly practical way gives ‘flesh and blood’ to the concept of love. Love poured out on every altar, love patiently awaiting us in every tabernacle, every monstrance, love coming into the depths of our bodies, souls, minds, and hearts to make love a living reality in our own life.

It is this unpredictable (who could ever have invented the Eucharist?), unprecedented (there really is nothing quite like this anywhere else), and dramatic (in other words, an event that occurs in real time and history, both the historical Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ and the ongoing event of the sacraments in the Church) activity of God which can alone translate love, real love, perfect love into an actual reality in our lives.

Deus Caritas Est – God is Love, and this love is poured out onto the world continually in the offering of Christ. And it is here that we both see and come to understand the way of love, and that way is made available to us as a real path we can walk on, if we choose. If we want our lives to reflect that kind of love.

Love is Indeed Ecstasy

It is part of love's growth towards higher levels and inward purification that it now seeks to become definitive, and it does so in a twofold sense: both in the sense of exclusivity (this particular person alone) and in the sense of being “for ever”. Love embraces the whole of existence in each of its dimensions, including the dimension of time. It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels (cf. Mt 10:39; 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24; Jn 12:25). In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfilment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.

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Reflection – What a great passage this is! Pope Benedict winds together so many images, basic biblical themes, theological insights, and connecting them in a few well-chosen words with the practical reality of love and the challenges and struggles of our daily life. He is at his best here, ‘firing on all cylinders.’
It is his connection of the dramatic language of the exodus, the profound spiritual image of the grain of wheat falling to the ground and dying, the Paschal Mystery of Christ, and your choices and mine this day to love or not love that is so striking.
It is ‘connection’ that counts here. It is when I realize that my choice to be generous or merciful or hospitable in some small everyday way is, in fact, another step in my ongoing journey out of Egypt and slavery into freedom, that I can find the grace to do it. Otherwise, it’s just an endless chore, a burden, a misery.
When I become aware of myself as ‘seed’, as a little hard thing that has little value or weight… but great potential, a potential only realized when it is broken, ceases to be a seed, becomes something quite different… well then, when the pressures of the heavy soil I am planted in begin to strain and crack me, I am more prone to remain there, rather than fleeing, shrugging off the commitment, the demands, shying away from the sacrifice it entails.
And when I finally get that every movement of my being, every moment of my life, everything actually going on in and around me and every conceivable future possibility is taken up, united to, and transformed by the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ, becomes in that a small movement in the Great Dance of Salvation… well, I am likely to find joy in the life he has given me, whatever pains and burdens it levies on me.
‘Without vision the people perish’, the Scriptures say. Pope Benedict has vision, and generously and beautifully shares this vision with us. And it is all tied up with the earlier part of the encyclical, the purification of eros into agape, the true meaning of ecstasy in the Christian mystery, the ongoing call not to merely lose ourselves in some intense Dionysian release of pleasure, but to freely and nobly give ourselves—through, with, and in Jesus—in a solemn act of selfless love, lived out here and now in the duty of each moment.

Who Will Do the Loving?

Concretely, what does this path of ascent and purification [of eros] entail? How might love be experienced so that it can fully realize its human and divine promise? Here we can find a first, important indication in the Song of Songs, an Old Testament book well known to the mystics. According to the interpretation generally held today, the poems contained in this book were originally love-songs, perhaps intended for a Jewish wedding feast and meant to exalt conjugal love. In this context it is highly instructive to note that in the course of the book two different Hebrew words are used to indicate “love”. First there is the word dodim, a plural form suggesting a love that is still insecure, indeterminate and searching. This comes to be replaced by the word ahabà, which the Greek version of the Old Testament translates with the similar-sounding agape, which, as we have seen, becomes the typical expression for the biblical notion of love. By contrast with an indeterminate, “searching” love, this word expresses the experience of a love which involves a real discovery of the other, moving beyond the selfish character that prevailed earlier. Love now becomes concern and care for the other. No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.

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Reflection – ‘Everybody’s got a hungry heart… I still haven’t found what I’m looking for… I can’t get no satisfaction…’ and so on and so forth. The annals of popular music bear witness to this reality that Pope Benedict so ably describes in this passage from his first encyclical. Dodim – searching love, hungry love, love that pursues, clings to, is moved by the beloved. We all know this, regardless of our state of life—it is intrinsic to the human experience.
In our modern world (and it may well be that this is no modern innovation, but a perennial human reality) the idea seems to be that we are hungry, we desire, we search, we pursue… and then the big happy ending is that we attain the object of our desire and are satisfied.
Pope Benedict points out quite wisely that this doesn’t really work. Catherine Doherty made the same point in a very different way. She had talked with many teenagers and young adults about their aspirations and dreams for life. Most of them wanted to get married, and when she asked them why, they mostly answered, “So I can be loved.” Her question was short and to the point: “And who is going to do the loving?”
If it’s all about ‘my hunger’ and my quest to have my desires met… well, where does that leave the rest of you? What about your hunger, your desire? There’s a deep question of our humanity at stake in all this. If we’re all just a bunch of hungry hearts running around looking for satisfaction… well, who’s going to do the loving? If it’s left there, doesn’t it all get turned into mutual using, mutual desiring, what one of our MH staff calls ‘the law of mutual gobbling’?
The Holy Father points out the way out of this ‘law,’ which in Scripture is really what is meant by the term ‘the flesh’ – what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours. Love is always about ‘the other’ – but immature love is about what the other can give me. Love is to be matured past that – the other matters because they matter – not because he or she gives me this or that, ‘satisfies’ me in one way or another (this is about much more than sex, you know – there are all kind of ways of both using the other and truly loving the other).
Pope Benedict will go on in the encyclical (and we will go right along with him) to show how it is that love is purified from use to a true caring for the other. It is the path of commitment, consecration, true gift of self to the other. It is, simply, marriage, whether the vocation of marriage between man and woman or the total consecration of the person to the True Other, the deep gift of self to God which is predicated on the deep gift of God to each. And this is the path each one of us is travelling on, the path of purified eros leading us to the heights of agape and self-gift. A hard path, but the only one that leads up, if you know what I mean.

An Embrace Forever Given

Two things emerge clearly from this rapid overview of the concept of eros past and present. First, there is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence. Yet we have also seen that the way to attain this goal is not simply by submitting to instinct. Purification and growth in maturity are called for; and these also pass through the path of renunciation. Far from rejecting or “poisoning” eros, they heal it and restore its true grandeur. This is due first and foremost to the fact that man is a being made up of body and soul. Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united; the challenge of eros can be said to be truly overcome when this unification is achieved. Should he aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness… it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature. Only thus is love —eros—able to mature and attain its authentic grandeur. Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed. Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive.

Eros, reduced to pure “sex”, has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man's great “yes” to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless. Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere. The apparent exaltation of the body can quickly turn into a hatred of bodiliness. Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility. True, eros tends to rise “in ecstasy” towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing.

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Reflection – Well, I tried and tried to find some way to shorten this paragraph of the encyclical, but you know, I just couldn’t do it. It’s so brilliant, so insightful, so packed with meaning – every sentence of it, every word of it. I’ve been going through thispart of the encyclical, reflecting on how well it meets the truth we all at least sort of know – that the sexual revolution which was supposed to bring such liberation and joy has brought disease and death, that eros left to its own devices degrades into use and exploitation - mere lust.

It is in this passage that we see, or at least begin to see, what it means for eros not to be left to its own devices, for it to be purified and lifted up so that it does indeed rise ‘in ecstasy’ towards the Divine. It is a question of the whole person being one in his or her body and soul, and the ecstatic movement of erotic desire being taken up into whole movement of the person. Self-gift, self-disposition, a total choice to embrace this person, not only in the one moment of union and pleasure, but all of each embracing all of the other. And not just a total embrace now, but an embrace that is forever given. And not just an embrace of the other as they are, but all his or her potentialities, most of all the capacity to engender life. A total embrace excluding nothing, not the future of this person nor what may come forth from them. In short, marriage, and openness to life in that marital embrace. This is the purification of eros.
The old fashioned language was ‘remedy of concupiscence’, but not in a simple minded sense that marriage provided a licit place to satisfy one's sexual desires, but in this deeper sense. In the vocation of marriage, desire is taken up into and incorporated into a personal choice to dedicate oneself to the other and hold nothing back from that dedication, and to accept always and in every movement of marriage that which may come from that dedication, namely the children God wants to give you. Eros is purified by being brought into the mystery of sacrificial love and death to self.

The Purification of Eros

Did Christianity really destroy eros? Let us take a look at the pre- Christian world. The Greeks—not unlike other cultures—considered eros principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a “divine madness” which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness. All other powers in heaven and on earth thus appear secondary: “Omnia vincit amor” says Virgil in the Bucolics—love conquers all—and he adds: “et nos cedamus amori”—let us, too, yield to love. In the religions, this attitude found expression in fertility cults, part of which was the “sacred” prostitution which flourished in many temples. Eros was thus celebrated as divine power, as fellowship with the Divine. The Old Testament firmly opposed this form of religion, which represents a powerful temptation against monotheistic faith, combating it as a perversion of religiosity. But it in no way rejected eros as such; rather, it declared war on a warped and destructive form of it, because this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it. Indeed, the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing “divine madness”: far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited. An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in “ecstasy” towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man. Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.

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Reflection – This post picks up where a previous one leaves off. You know, I love it when Pope Benedict agrees with me! Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

When I was a newly ordained priest, oils still wet on my hands, there was a certain popular novel making a lot of waves, and bringing people to question their faith about Jesus and the Church. I decided to teach a course at the parish I was at that would debunk this ridiculous novel. But, of course, I had to read the thing first.

So yes, I read The Da Vinci Code. Now, I am not a very accomplished ascetic; I am not known for my all-night vigils, my sunken cheeks and eyes due to my heroic fasting, my ability to assume uncomfortable postures of prayer for hours on end.

But give me this: I actually read The !/&*@# Da Vinci Code. (Excuse my language). Surely that counts for something (although perhaps not, now that I’m complaining about it)! And, of course, that fatuous piece of best selling tripe is all about this business of sacred eros and holy prostitution and all that stuff. How empowering it is for women to be conduits of the divine… for men, of course.

At the time, I had precisely the response that Pope Benedict writes above. Women are just being used in this scenario! They are not valued as persons, but as instruments delivering some kind of ‘sacred’ experience to men. There is no real love, no real bowing before the beauty and sacred value of the person—just a using to get some kind of experience. Whether it is a simple experience of lust and pleasure or some elevated ‘sacred high’ is irrelevant. And where do women go, then, to get their sacred experience? Or do they not need one?

And this is the way of eros, if left to its own dynamism. It is such a powerful force, such an intense experience, that we tend to use the other person to deliver this erotic high to us. Eros is made by God, and is beautiful and good, but it is not sufficient unto itself. Left to itself, it degrades to lust and use.

And so we begin to work our way towards Pope Benedict’s answer to the charge of modernity, the accusation that the Church is anti-sex, anti-eros, anti-fun, and ultimately anti-human. He says, “Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.” And this is where the next instalment of the encyclical will take us, to the purification of eros so that it may realize its divine intent in our human being.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Garden

That love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings, was called eros by the ancient Greeks. Let us note straight away that the Greek Old Testament uses the word eros only twice, while the New Testament does not use it at all: of the three Greek words for love, eros, philia (the love of friendship) and agape, New Testament writers prefer the last, which occurs rather infrequently in Greek usage… The tendency to avoid the word eros, together with the new vision of love expressed through the word agape, clearly point to something new and distinct about the Christian understanding of love. In the critique of Christianity which began with the Enlightenment and grew progressively more radical, this new element was seen as something thoroughly negative. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Christianity had poisoned eros, which for its part, while not completely succumbing, gradually degenerated into vice. Here the German philosopher was expressing a widely-held perception: doesn't the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life? Doesn't she blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator's gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?

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Reflection – Pope Benedict of course will go on in this passage to answer the challenge of Nietzsche et al. But isn’t this such a typical criticism of the Catholic Church! The Church, the killjoy! The Church, bestower of Catholic guilt upon the world! The Church, who ruins everything with Her silly little rules and proscriptions and finger-wagging shame-inflicting poisonous so-called moral ‘law’. Bah!

Away with Her! Ecclesia delenda est – the Church must be destroyed! She is all that stands in the way of human happiness, expressed in boundless sexual activity. We've got to get ourselves back to the garden, Joni Mitchell sang in 'Woodstock'. Once we're there, it'll all be all right. It'll be just grand.

Except… as Mary Eberstadt points out wryly in her wonderful Loser Letters, at this stage in the game, it’s getting a little hard to pretend about that anymore, isn’t it? It’s not like the whole world is still in the grip of Catholic morality, and so we can speculate what it would be like to be free of it all. Large swaths of the world have decidedly shrugged off Catholic morality with élan, haven’t they? And of course it has generated untold human happiness and joy, right? Walk down the streets of Toronto, New York, Amsterdam, Paris, Montreal, Los Angeles, and people are literally dancing for joy, hugging each other, tears of happiness streaming down their faces now that the Wicked Witch is dead (ding dong)!

No? Looking a little grim out there? The broken marriages, STDs, abortions, betrayals, meaningless hook-ups, serial relationships, using one another for pleasure, etc. etc., somehow don’t all end up in a net increase of human happiness? Humph. Fancy.

Must be something wrong with unbridled eros. It will be interesting to see what Pope Benedict says about it next!

This Post is About Sex

The Prophets, particularly Hosea and Ezekiel, described God's passion for his people using boldly erotic images. God's relationship with Israel is described using the metaphors of betrothal and marriage; idolatry is thus adultery and prostitution. Here we find a specific reference—as we have seen—to the fertility cults and their abuse of eros, but also a description of the relationship of fidelity between Israel and her God. The history of the love-relationship between God and Israel consists, at the deepest level, in the fact that he gives her the Torah, thereby opening Israel's eyes to man's true nature and showing her the path leading to true humanism. It consists in the fact that man, through a life of fidelity to the one God, comes to experience himself as loved by God, and discovers joy in truth and in righteousness—a joy in God which becomes his essential happiness: “Whom do I have in heaven but you? And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides you ... for me it is good to be near God” (Ps 73 [72]:25, 28).

Deus Caritas Est 9

Reflection – “The Church should get out of the sex business.” I still remember one of the MH staff quoting that to me years ago, words spoken to her by her brother. The Church’s teachings on sex and marriage have never been easy to obey; in the past fifty years they have become for many incomprehensible, unacceptable, even ridiculous. Since no one (hardly) even is willing to entertain the Church’s teachings on these matters, why doesn’t the Church stop making itself ridiculous (religulous?) and just drop the whole subject? The gross and widely publicized infidelity of a few of the Church’s priests and bishops doesn’t help the cause.

This we all know. In this passage from the encyclical, though, we see a glimmer of why the Church just cannot do it. We can’t get out of the ‘sex business’ for a simple reason: sex is not a business!

It is not a commodity, a good to be used and abused, a unit of exchange among human beings, a bargaining chip in relationships, a field of the endless power struggle between men and women and all variations therein. Sex as a business is a depressing reflection of how we fallen human beings actually think of it and what we do with it, though, isnʼt it?

Sex is in truth a reflection, we learn from the prophets, of the very nature of God, and his disposition towards humanity. It is a deeply theological reality in its essence. The nuptial imagery of Hosea, Ezekiel, Isaiah is not a tangential, secondary reference in the Old Testament. Rather, it is a deepening of a theme introduced in Genesis 2 – the nuptial joy of Adam and Eve mirroring God’s joy in his creation, a joy which finds its summation in his making man and woman ‘in his own image’.

This nuptial joy, this erotic theme of the Bible, finds its summation and glory in Christ, revealed as the Bridegroom, the one in whom the union of God and the human person is consummated – made complete, brought to its deepest realization this side of paradise.

And this is why we just cannot relax our sexual ethos into the modern laissez faire attitude. Sex is this stubbornly incarnate element of our humanity which is supposed to reveal to us, in our most deeply fleshly experience of life, something deep about the truth of God.

Sex, therefore must occur in a faithful covenantal relationship that is open to life. Otherwise it does not communicate the truth of God and becomes a sort of incarnational heresy. And this is the great tragedy of our modern age – the very place where we are meant to enter into the deep truth of God’s love has become a place of business, of selfishness, of something else, anyhow – some kind of extension of egoism or self-will. God made us, and it, for something better, something much, much better.