TRUE LOVE
Author: Fr. Michael Byron February 12, 2022
Is it so wrong to wish to be
happy? Or to provide for the happiness of our children and families? And is it so bad choosing those things not
just someday, but now? Does being a
faithful Christian demand being miserable in this life? Is suffering the sign of a good and holy life
– is it proof of one being embraced by God?
From the sound of today’s gospel,
it would surely seem so. Woe to the
rich. Blessed are the poor. Woe to the happy. Blessed are the weeping. This is not a savior that you’d want to
invite to your next party. What a
depressing mope? But Jesus understands more
about the nature of love than we do, and he was trying to teach his disciples today
that people are not neatly separated into the sad ones and the happy ones. Rather, at every moment of life we are this
agonizing mixture of both. And it is impossible
truly to live, truly to love, without embracing everything that is beautiful about
that gift – including suffering.
In the movie many years ago,
called Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins played the rough biography of the
British poet and author C.S. Lewis. He
falls madly in love with a woman named, appropriately enough, Joy. Joy develops cancer and eventually dies, and
Lewis goes into this crippling bout of grief, including a crisis of faith. His life had been so blissful and satisfying
up to then, and he always had everything under his control – except for the one
thing he realized he couldn’t control: i.e. the loss of his beloved. He
is bewildered how the very same person could be the source of both such great
ecstasy and crushing loss at the very same time. It’s in the nature of true love, and only
those who genuinely have experienced it can begin to understand it. After Joy dies he is trying to come to terms
with such a great mystery. And his
epiphany was, as he said, “The pain now is part of the happiness then; that’s
the deal.” If you aren’t suffering, then
you don’t know the contours of love.
It is not wrong to desire
happiness, nor is it wrong to wish to avoid hardship. But it’s not like turning on a switch. Real Christian love always involves both.
So Jesus here is really doing
nothing more or less in his preaching than making sure that his friends know
just exactly what they are signing up for.
But what then are we to make of
people whose lives are perpetually easy, or perpetually miserable? It means that there’s been a misunderstanding
about the nature of love. A life lived
in this world that has never learned to grieve or that has never learned to
mourn over the suffering of others is a life that has never come to terms with
true love for the neighbor; it is truncated. And for such people there is a call to mission here – not just to do
things for other people, but to truly allow themselves to be drawn into love.
And for those whose lives are
characterized by enduring hunger and weeping and exclusion, these are the signs
to us, the sacraments of how much real love has yet to be realized among the
Christian community. Nothing would
please God more than to see their mourning turned into dancing, for them to
become the life of the party. How much
and when that happens is up to us. These
are the ones who are ready to be loved. By sharing in their struggles we become actually happy ourselves –
that’s how love works, that’s the deal. Only lovers truly get that. Christian love is so much more than a do-gooding project.
So may our prayer today be that we’ll be
transformed into true lovers – that God’s spirit will show us how, each in our
own place and time, especially here in the
Eucharist.
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