TRUE LOVE

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.