The Suffering of Love

There is something uniquely eternal about love. After all: "and now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor 13:13), and "God is love" (1 Jn 4:8). Love, unlike faith and hope, is uniquely conceivable without a temporal dimension. Love cares for what has come to be--what is--and not for the formless possibility of what might be in the future. This is why love is tortured by time, which continually threatens the objects in which it rests. Only love can, and must, suffer, while faith and hope do not.

Human agency is the agency of love, the operation of this most divine longing. Yet the opportunities for the action of love are too often inaccessible to us. The more aware we are of the world, the more love is awakened within us and the more incompetent we find ourselves to be in uniting with the loveliness within objects. There is literally not enough time for our love. We have not the skills needed to enact it. When we seem to have succeeded in some small measure, it is at the painful cost of neglecting some other loveliness. The byproduct of love in the midst of temporality is always grief and regret.

To be temporal is to suffer, not because time is evil but because there is something timeless at the core of our being: "he has placed eternity in their hearts" (Ecc 3:11). This is why the physical ailments we term "suffering" are so insufferable: because they eat away at the already-too-little time and energy we have for love. And perhaps this explains the most suffocating forms of depression: an oppressive sense of dread as our fallen and finite capacities encounter a world of infinite loveliness. Whether diagnosable or not, species of these sufferings are the inevitable price of a life that is lived in a temporal world that is "charged with the grandeur of God". 

The ultimate realization of temporal suffering is the final loss of agency in death, for there the possibility of love is at an end. Death thus makes the task of love infinitely more urgent, but at the same time it renders love's meaning questionable in the extreme."The afterlife," conceived simplistically as an indefinite continuation of this form of temporal existence, would only exacerbate this problem. Love would never find its home. Its sense of loss would mount infinitely with the coming into being and passing away of the objects (and moments) of love. In light of this perplexing antinomy, we must conclude that death itself is some form of mercy, precisely because it is the necessary presupposition of the possibility of some other, better, form of love's existence. 

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (Jn 12:24). The scriptures speak of death neither as love's total cessation, nor as an intrusive but ultimately temporary obstacle in love's infinite march forward. No, death is somehow the doorway to love's home. One dies in order to live in a new mode, one in which all of love's objects, one's own and those of others, are present to one all at once with their true depth of loveliness, its Source, now apparent. No longer must one object and its loveliness give way to another in a cruel zero-sum game; now all serve as factors in a multiplication whose product is innumerable. This is the hope of resurrection, and this is why love must take up its cross and suffer. 

The love of apatheia

What if passion is an impediment to love? When studying the early church, students seem to find no idea as foreign to their own context as the counsel to put aside the passions. Sentiment, after all, is the only universal we have left. Having banished truth and beauty to the realm of the relative, the only appeal to a common humanity left to us is a single finger gesturing to the heart. Can we moderns say with the desert monastics that passion is demonic?

In the City of God, Augustine searches out the misery of the demons. The word daemon refers to "knowing", but theirs is not a dispassionate knowledge or a cold reason. What makes the demons miserable is that they are essentially all knowledge and all passion. Yet, one thing they lack. Citing 1 Corinthians 8:1, Augustine reasons with Paul to say that "knowledge is of no benefit without love. Without love... [knowledge] swells people up with a pride that is nothing but empty windiness." Bereft of love, the demons become the rage that is perfect knowledge united with frustrated passion. Demons are beings of knowledge unconditioned by love.

For Augustine, passions are sanctified by the godly mind, to be "instruments of justice... The question is not whether the godly mind is angered, but why; not whether it is saddened, but why." The passions are rightly utilised to the extent that they empower compassion. 

So we might ask: can apatheia enable love? Does the denial of passion open the door to compassion? Frances Young reflects on this question with reference to caring for her son, Arthur, who was born with a severe learning disability. For Young, Apatheia is not mere emotional suppression. “Apatheia, which Evagrius believes is never actually attained in this life, should be understood as ‘emotional integration’, or that detachment which is essential to true love” (God's Presence, 292). Not only does apatheia enable love, it reveals the true character of love to us:

“Sometimes what passes for love is really self-centred anxiety, as I have realized when time and again distressed by Arthur’s distress, finding it hard to cope when he is unsettled, unwell, or in pain, cannot express what is wrong, and the more we try to sort the problem the more frantic and furious he gets, hating to be handled, not understanding that we’re trying to deal with his discomfort. Frustration mounts, creating its own distress and anger, which hardly helps his—in fact, compounds it. Too easily inner demons of self-pity, a sense of failure, inadequacy and helplessness take over. So I recognize that I really need apatheia in order to love properly. Love requires a degree of detachment, an ability to let the other person be, to be ‘other’, to be what they are rather than what you want them to be.” (292-293).

The practice of apatheia might just be a way of laying down our lives for the sake of another.

God is love: Varieties of love in Christian tradition

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." 
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The belief that “God is love” is at the heart of the Christian tradition. But when different Christian teachers talk about God’s love, they can have quite different things in mind. Without any claim to comprehensiveness, here’s a sketch of 12 types of love in the Christian tradition:

1. Pedagogical love: God loves us the way a wise educator loves his pupils (Clement of Alexandria, Origen) – our love for God is like an insatiable love of learning.

2. Maternal love: God loves us with the self-giving tenderness of a mother for her children (Augustine, Julian of Norwich) – our love for God is like a child’s affectionate dependence on the mother.

3. Paternal love: God loves us with the strong supervisory care of a father for his children (Tertullian, Calvin) – our love for God is like the reverential admiration and trust of a child with his father.

4. Courteous love: God loves us with courtly courtesy (George Herbert) – our love of God is like a sweet, mutually attentive conversation between host and guest.

5. Married love: God loves us with the courteous familiarity of a spouse (Julian of Norwich) – our love for God is like the free and intimate conversation between spouses (note that this is not a sexualised picture of marriage; it's more Jane Austen than D. H. Lawrence).

6. Celibate love: God loves us infinitely, but with a certain restraint (Methodius, Macrina) – our love for God is like a chaste and never-consummated yearning.

7. Erotic love: God loves us with the warmth and eagerness of a lover (Pseudo-Dionysius) – our love for God is like an ecstasy that takes us out beyond ourselves into unspeakable union with another.

8. Aesthetic love: God loves us because we reflect something of God’s own infinite beauty (Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine) – our love for God is a bigger version of the love we feel whenever we see a beautiful thing.

9. Purifying love: God loves us in the manner of an artist who creates an artwork and then patiently removes the imperfections (Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh) – we might experience God’s love as a fire of torment (i.e. as hell), but it's all for our good.

10. Authoritative love: God loves us the way a wise and charismatic ruler loves the people (Tertullian, Athanasius) – we love God with something like the intense loyalty and admiration that the Macedonian soldiers felt towards Alexander the Great.

11. Brotherly love: God loves us as an older brother loves his siblings (Desert Fathers & Mothers) – our love for God is free, familiar, and confident.

12. Friendly love: God’s love is a firm and loyal commitment to friendship for its own sake (Karl Barth) – our love for God is like reciprocating the loyalty of a friend.

Note: I don’t mean that these are entirely separate things. They’re differences in emphasis, not mutually incompatible ideas. The names beside each type are merely representative. You could put a name like Origen or Augustine beside nearly every type of love on the list, which is probably saying something about Origen and Augustine.

Questions: What have I left out? Which of these types of love predominate in current theology?

But have not love: meditation on 1 Corinthians 13

And to think that all this time I called myself a Christian! But Christ lay dead in me.

I spoke in tongues with the Pentecostals, attended Bible study with the evangelicals, kissed icons with the Orthodox, worked for justice with the liberals. But Christ lay dead in me.

I went to church and said amen, I sang the alleluias. But Christ lay dead in me.

I prayed Christ’s words, I knew them all by heart, I ate the bread of life and drank his cup. But Christ lay dead in me.

I kept the Lenten fast and kept the vigil, sang Easter hymns, said Christ is risen. But Christ lay dead in me.

I studied Christ, read books about him, and as if that weren’t enough I wrote some too. (Letter from a woman in Johannesburg: Thank you for your book. It helped me to believe in Christ again.) But Christ lay dead in me.

With the gift of prophecy stirring in my chest I climbed the narrow steps into the pulpit. I looked out on the faces of the waiting worshippers. I preached Christ to them as though my life depended on it. But Christ lay dead in me.

I did my prayers and readings, I lit a candle and knelt each night before the cross above my bed. But Christ lay dead in me.

I went on pilgrimage, prayed in monasteries, visited great churches and cathedrals, saw the relics of saints and martyrs. But Christ lay dead in me.

I prayed O wisdom, O Adonai, O root of Jesse, O key of David, O morning star, O king of nations, O Emmanuel. It was Advent and I prayed as if expecting something. But Christ lay dead in me. 

The doubts began. Not niggling manageable doubts but doubts like earthquakes, doubts that shift the roads and bring the bridges down. Not that I had many doubts, only four. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Four witnesses who said that Christ was still alive. But I knew the place where they had laid him: for Christ lay dead in me.

I took the consecrated bread. I thought, it is the greatest mystery or the greatest folly, who knows which. I ate it as though eating death. For Christ lay dead in me.

When they told me lift up your hearts, I lied we lift them to the Lord. My heart was ashes, not thanks and praise. I could not lift it if I tried. Christ lay dead in me.

And then.

And then I sought and found my enemy, the one I love the least. I looked into his face. I spoke his name. I clasped his hand and said my brother. And Christ stood up in me, alive as on the first day, and inside me something moved, as big as stones, and all the graves gaped open.

A wedding homily

by Kim Fabricius, from a recent wedding in Swansea [names changed]

First, an accent check: How many soldiers here have served in Iraq or Afghanistan? Okay, so you’ll be used to me speaking American. American soldiers – they’re the ones who put the “oops” in “troops” and the “miss” in “missile”.

Doug – soldier; Hester – teacher. I’ve married soldiers, and I’ve married teachers, but never the one to the other. It’s an arrangement with promise. Doug, for instance, will be used to being under authority, and obeying orders even when they’re daft; and Hester will be used to a person in uniform behaving badly, and muttering annoying comments under his breath. Hester, just remember that a husband is like a fine malt whisky: it will take him years to mature – though I wouldn’t get your hopes up for more than a 12-year-old. Doug, I’m afraid for you I have no advice whatsoever.

This is a real, very personal pleasure for me. Of Hester – well, let’s just say of Hester I am very fond. And since she spent a year in the US, even if in the Windy City (Chicago) rather than the Big Apple, add to fond a kind of bond. That’s today’s icing on the cake of preaching at any wedding. I’m now a retired minister, but I’ve been taking fewer and fewer weddings for years. And not just because we now live in a post-Christian society, but also because – well, why get married in a church when you can do it at a fashionable hotel, an atmospheric castle, or a sunny beach abroad?

Yet even in our aggressively secular society, the rumour of God persists. While celebrity is now regarded as a career option, wealth a vocation, and cosmetic surgery the fountain of youth, nevertheless, in the wake of this ubiquitous cultural banality, some silly people will go on asking, “Is that it?” – and sense that no, it isn’t, sense that there is something more, often because in times of great joy or deep trauma – at the birth of a child (or grandchild) perhaps, so outrageously loved, or after a dreadful diagnosis, so irretrievably wrenching – at such times some people hear reality whisper in their ears. Christians suggest that through such “signals of transcendence” God is trying to get in touch with us. And if a couple has been so touched, and they decide that cohabitation isn’t quite commitment enough, that they want to get married but feel that a civil ceremony, wherever, lacks depth, mystery, ultimacy, that “congratulations” doesn’t quite cut it, that a blessing is essential, then they may ask for a church wedding, at which the minister will begin by saying, “We are gathered here in the presence of God …”

Yes, today we are “doing” God, which is quite a counter-cultural thing to do. How so? Well, for example, the church’s suggestion that while “following your feelings” may be the gospel of Hello magazine, a more superficial take on a serious relationship is hard to imagine. The suggestion that, in marriage, so-called “lifestyle choices” and even careers should recede in importance, while raising children should become a sacred possibility. And the suggestion that marrying the “right person” is actually a rather silly idea, as is demonstrated by how often Mr. or Mrs. Right so often becomes Mr. or Mrs. Wrong, and is replaced by Mr. or Mrs. Even-Righter.

Why do people actually get married? In her novel The Other Side of You, Salley Vickers makes an observation about an “elementary … equation [that] is rarely recognised. The reasons for choice of partner are obscure and what passes for love is generally a decidedly mixed bag … [of] lust, anxiety, lack of self-worth … cowardice, fear, recklessness, … the need to control.… There are other, happier ingredients, though these finer impulses can wreak more havoc than the more blackguardly ones.”

A cynical take on marriage? Rather, I think, a candid and accurate assessment. And that’s why it’s not the chemistry, or even the “heart” but, finally, the promises that a couple make that are the crucial factor in a marriage – promises made hoping to God that we may keep them. For, in ourselves, how can we possibly know what promising lifelong fidelity means, not just for bad but for worse? I mean, it’s all very well to assume we will be faithful through flu, flab, and flatulence, but what about MS or Alzheimer’s, or unemployment shattering our precious plans, or our pensions turning to dust? How can we make such radical promises as “until we are parted by death” when we are young, healthy, and earning?

And the honest answer is: we can make them only if we are the kind of people who can be held to the promises we make when we do not really know what we are in for when we make them. Only if – only if Doug and Hester see that love is learned even more than it is given, that love is a skill, a practice; see that love is more the result of a good relationship than the cause of it; see that marriage itself creates the context in which they may discover what love really is and, in the process, who they really are. Only if they see that an enduring relationship is built on the virtues of attentiveness, patience, perseverance, and, above all, sacrifice and forgiveness, each giving more than they expect to receive. Only if they don’t get so wrapped up in themselves that they lose touch with you, their friends, the ones who will keep them sane. And only if the resources on which they draw come not only from within and without, but from above, from the God we are “doing” today.

Finally, that Salley Vickers passage – here is how it ends: “Seldom, very seldom, do two people unite [in marriage] through sheer reciprocal joy in the other’s being.” Hester, Doug, my prayer for you is that you will experience this “sheer reciprocal joy”, and experience it ever more deeply as you grow old together, such that, as wonderful as this day is, it will turn out to be the day in your marriage that you loved each other least.

Eleven theses on love

1. I have observed in my own handwriting a peculiar involuntary tic. My capital E is normally executed with three strokes: a sharp L-shape, followed by two swift horizontal strokes. It is a crooked, abrupt, ungainly sort of letter. But whenever I write the word Elise – my wife's name – the E takes on a completely different form and style. It is executed with a single fluid cursive stroke; it is curved, almost elegant, like a back-to-front 3. It is the only time my handwriting produces such a shape. Under all normal circumstances, my E – like the rest of my handwriting – is a rather jagged, haphazard, Runic, pagan-looking thing. But just ask me to spell my wife's name, and that first grapheme is mysteriously transfigured into something smooth, Cyrillic, serenely clean and Christian. As though it were inadequate to assign to her name any regular letter of the Roman alphabet; as though she required her own distinct letter, without which her name cannot be spelled or uttered; as though my love for her were the sanctification of language.

2. Like the Name of God which rebounds silently away from human speech, so love transcends language and eludes the grasp of words. Love is like the trauma that imposes its own peculiar patterns on a person's speech. Love is the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet.

3. Love escapes language, because love transcends the law. It is that towards which law is always reaching; it is that which law has never touched. "Love is the fulfilment of the law" (Romans 13:10).

4. Love is not desire, even though it appropriates desire the way a flame appropriates dry wood. To love is to desire the desire of another. Which means: love is kenosis, love is loss, love is the purgation of desire. 

5. The purification of love is the task of life and the purpose of religion. The Christian faith is an ascetic doctrine of life, because it is a doctrine of love and joy. "All true joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism, … the repudiation of the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the one joy" (G. K. Chesterton). Love without asceticism is sentimentality – paltry, small, and sad.

6. The widespread sentimentalisation of romantic love in our society is a casual defacement of the Holy. Our pop songs and romantic comedies and breezy one-night stands are the moral equivalent of scribbling your lover's name beside the toilet in a public restroom. Except that it is God's Name – for "God is love" (1 John 4:16).

7. The experience of falling in love is the emotional shock produced by a sudden reorientation of personal attention. But such an experience is not yet love. To sustain that attention over time, even at great cost, is what it means to love. 

8. Love without time is an absurdity, like fire without burning. Love is a mode of attention stretched out across time. Love is the temporal direction of the self. Love is nothing else than a certain object plus devotion plus time. "Love is patient" (1 Cor 13:4). That is why "the choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life" (Martha Nussbaum).

9. Love is mostly failure. If we understood ourselves, we would repent of our loves as one repents of the most appalling crime. Love is so entangled with selfish desire that we cannot even clearly tell the difference; nothing but the day of judgment will distinguish wheat from chaff. God's judgment does for me what I cannot do for myself: it separates one thing, love, from everything else that I am and everything else that I have done. What I need, all I need, is judgment. I live in desperate hope towards God's judgment, which is also God's mercy – the only kind of mercy worth the name. 

10. The opposite of love is not hatred, but shame. "Love bade me welcome yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin" (George Herbert). Divine love is the abolition of shame. It is hospitality, welcome, the healing of the wounded gaze. "Love took my hand and smiling did reply, / Who made the eyes but I?" Shame stoops over, looking inward on the self. Quick-eyed love stands up straight, face to face with the beloved.

11. God's Word is love. Simone Weil: "God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion…. This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration."

The song: a short story

After dinner he felt so happy that he went into the other room and wrote a song, full of small words of simple gladness. When it was finished he brought it to her and said, Look, I wrote you a song.

She said, All this time you were so silent, I thought you must be mad at me, I thought you must be brooding, I thought you no longer loved me, I thought you were all alone, I thought you might be thinking of someone else.

He said, But I only think of you.

When she sat down to read the song, she was silent a long time while her heart within her grew glad and boundless as the heart of a child. Watching her carefully from the corner of his eye, he wondered if it was his fault that she had suddenly grown so quiet, so sullen and so subdued, if he had done something to offend her, if she still loved him, if she had ever really loved him, if she was thinking of somebody else, if she was all alone in her thoughts, alone beside him in the pale lamplight with the song of his heart in her hands.

A Love Story

After their fourth date at bingo night, he untucked the napkin from his top shirt button, carefully returned the crumpled handkerchief to his pocket, pushed his glasses all the way up to the bridge of his nose, and inquired, squinting intently across the table in what might have been a gallant smile or might merely have been a stomach complaint, gastritis or pancreatitis or giardiasis, or just a touch of reflux or heartburn or indigestion, if she would like to take a turn around the rose garden. They went out together in the evening air and sat a while under the winking stars and the vine-tangled trellis and the heavy lovesick fragrance of the roses.

When their talk had stumbled into one of those cavernous silences, he began to fidget with the buttons on his shirt. He blew his nose. He scratched at something on his knee. He found some wax in his left ear. He coughed politely. He said, There’s something I’d like to tell you, though I’ve never told another soul.

She thought: Ah, and so it goes. She thought: There has been some scandal. She thought: He is a gambler. She thought: He is a homosexual. She thought: He is married, a Don Juan, a heartbreaker, a scoundrel. She thought: He is a war criminal, and they will take him away to jail. She thought: Oh my dear God, he is a Mormon.

He said: You see, it’s just that I – I never – well, you see, I never really read. I only buy books for the colours. They look so lovely, like flowers. I arrange them like my mother used to arrange bouquets of gardenias in the kitchen. But I never read them. Not a single page. Not anymore.

She said: My daughter says I love the opera. She always takes me. She got season tickets last year. Before the music starts I turn my hearing aids off. The silence, it’s just so, I don’t know, so – calm.

He said: When I get a new one, I always read the back, just in case someone asks about it. So I'll look like I’ve read it.

She said: Sometimes I even turn them off when my daughter comes to visit. My how that one prattles, she’s every inch her father.

He said: I cheat on the Sunday crosswords.

She said: It was me who drove my husband’s car into the pole. He was so sad, so disappointed. I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I said someone else must have done it while I was shopping. He went to his grave believing that, Lord rest him, poor dear sweet kind man.

He said: Some days when I wake up tired, I don’t have the strength to change my underwear. I slip a clean pair in the laundry basket so the nurses won’t know. They count them, you know. They’re watching everything, keeping records.

She said: Sometimes I can’t control my – you know, my – sometimes I think I might be a little – what's the word? – incontinent? The nurses all know. But I try to hide it all the same. I sometimes think it’s the worst thing about growing old.

He said: The bladder.

She said: Not specifically. Just the way I'm always so – embarrassed.

He said: I don’t really like the bingo. I just thought you’d enjoy it. I just wanted to be with you, that's all.

She said: Now that you mention it, I suppose I don’t really care much for bingo either. Not like I used to.

And then she smiled shyly, like a girl.

Beside the goldfish pond hedged with roses he took her hand, and, after a few fumbling false starts, squinting and panting from exertion, he pressed it to his lips. Their hands were still touching when the nurses wheeled them back up the path, side by side across the green lawn and into the common room, where one or two other residents looked up, blinking in surprise, as though for a moment they had caught a sudden faint scent of something sweet, like a summer garden or a house where children play or one of those milkbars with the big bright jars of six-a-penny lollies in the window.

Gifts: a love poem

Here's one of my favourite love poems, by the Australian Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonucal. In contrast to all the tedious, unimaginative hype that surrounds Valentine's Day each year, this poem portrays something quite wonderful and quite essential about the nature of romantic love:

Gifts

‘I will bring you love,’ said the young lover,
‘A glad light to dance in your dark eye.
Pendants I will bring of the white bone,
And gay parrot feathers to deck your hair.’

But she only shook her head.

‘I will put a child in your arms,’ he said.
‘Will be a great headman, great rain-maker.
I will make remembered songs about you
That all tribes in all the wandering camps
Will sing forever.’

But she was not impressed.

‘I will bring you the still moonlight of the lagoon
And steal for you the singing of all the birds;
I will bring down the stars from heaven to you,
And put the bright rainbow into your hand.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘bring me tree-grubs.’

On desire and beauty: an Augustinian anecdote

Some years ago, I remember taking an afternoon walk down the quiet suburban street where my wife and I were living at the time. It was early summer, a warm breeze stirred the languid jacarandas that bloomed beneath the cloudless Queensland sky.

After rambling around for half an hour or so, I noticed a woman walking towards me from the far end of the street. I had left my glasses at home, as I often do when I am out for a stroll – but even at this distance I could make out her slender waist, the curve of her hips, the dark tresses falling about her shoulders. A long skirt swayed as she walked, and I saw that she was carrying a baby at her side. I had never seen her before – I'm sure I would have remembered her. I knew most of the people around here, she must be new to the neighbourhood. I am by nature a shy person, but on this occasion I decided I would pause to chat with this lovely apparition as she passed me on the street. I would catch her eye and smile, welcome her to the neighbourhood, ask where she was from, perhaps make some innocent flirtatious remark. I continued to observe her figure as she drew closer, my thoughts lulled by the jacaranda breeze and the easy rhythm of her hips. And then, with a disorienting shock of pleasure and recognition, I saw – what I would have seen at once had I been wearing my glasses – that it was my wife, strolling in the sun with our baby daughter perched on her hip.

Augustine’s Confessions is in large measure a record of misplaced desire. Our hearts well up with idolatrous desire for created things. We turn to the world of beautiful things instead of turning to the one who is Beauty itself. “In my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you had made.” But even in our corruption and confusion, God remains the hidden object of our desire. God uses our misplaced desires to draw us, in spite of ourselves, to God. “You were with me, and I was not with you.” In our desire for beautiful things, we are suddenly ambushed by God’s beauty, deep and secret and seductive – just as, that summer afternoon, my wandering desire for the lovely form of a woman was ambushed by the woman I love. “You were radiant and resplendent, and you put to flight my blindness” (Confessions 10.27.38).

The best-ever title for a blog post

Halden offers a superb meditation on 1 Corinthians 13, and his reflection has the best title of any blog post I’ve ever read. I hope many of you pastors will use this as your sermon title next time you preach on 1 Corinthians 13. Perhaps your next wedding sermon...?

Ten propositions on self-love and related BS

by Kim Fabricius

1. There is a lot of BS talked about “self-love.” Allow me to wield a pitchfork and begin a cleanout of this particular Augean stable, the whiff of which has become unbearable in our shamelessly therapeutic culture.

2. It is often said that self-love is commanded in the Bible itself: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Such a reading of this text suggests either wishful thinking or exegesis gone on holiday. Luther and Calvin read more accurately and insightfully: they saw that neighbour-love begins only where self-love ends, and vice versa. As Robert Jenson observes: “Though it is sometimes supposed that Scripture’s famous mandate makes self-love a standard which our love for the other is to emulate, the relation in Scripture works the other way; Scripture contains no mention of self-love except as a foil for love of the other. The object of love is always other than the love.”

3. How, in fact, do we love ourselves? With a passion – the passion of distorted desire – which is to say with utter self-absorption. How are we to love others? With precisely that as-myself absorption – but directed entirely to the other-than-myself. The paradigms are the Trinity and the cross. Self-love looks inwards; in contrast, observe the gazes, the looks of love of Father, Son and Spirit, in Rublev’s famous icon. Self-love is full of itself; in contrast, other-love is empty of self, i.e. it is kenotic (cf. Philippians 2:1-11).

4. Am I saying, then, that we should hate ourselves? Heaven forbid! Self-hatred simply plays Tweedledum to self-love’s Tweedledee: both are equally forms of self-centredness, of the homo incurvatus in se. We must be delivered from self altogether – and in Christ we are: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

5. By the way, what about the nostrum “Love the sinner (the neighbour) but hate the sin”? It sounds so intuitively right as to be unquestionable. But is the person so easily separable from the work? Is sin merely accidental, or is it not dispositional, if not ontological? An anthropological can of worms opens! Suffice it to say for this discussion that even if it is a distinction that can be drawn in principle, “loving the sinner but hating the sin,” as a populist ethic, is usually more honoured in the breach than the observance, amounting to the sheerest humbug. Look at the way the rhetoric of evil is deployed to deny the human rights of terrorists or the dignity of paedophiles. Or simply ask a gay Christian if he feels loved by the church that regards him as a sinner.

6. But to return to the main thread, “self-esteem” is the particularly modernist version of self-love (not postmodernist: in postmodernism there is no self to love or esteem!). It goes with the demise of the discourse of sin and guilt, and the ascendancy of the culture of narcissism (and victimhood): the crap of “I’m okay, you’re okay” (but that other bugger is blameworthy). Here we lose all contact with reality, because I’m not okay, I suck – and you do too. Well, don’t you? (If you don’t think you do, I refer you to Jeremiah 17:9.) Alcoholics Anonymous is closer to the truth: “I’m not okay, and you’re not okay, but that’s okay.”

7. But why is that okay? Because – and only because – Christ died for our unokayness are we okay, okay with God and therefore really okay – which is a rather vulgar restatement of the Reformation doctrine of the iustificatio impii. Ours is an “alien” okayness, an okayness extra nos, but this is not a fiction, and indeed it is precisely on the basis of the divine imprimatur that we are freed from self-love for other-love (which is why AA’s “but that’s okay” requires a supplement: to Luther’s iustificatio impii, add Calvin’s iustificatio iusti, or regeneratio). In more felicitous non-religious language, Paul Tillich rephrased the justification of the sinner as the “acceptance of the unacceptable.” Given – but only given – the sola gratia, perhaps “self-acceptance” is the word we are looking for. But even that is not the end of the matter…

8. I suggest that there are huge implications here for so-called Christian spirituality. I say “so-called” because in fact much of what now passes for Christian spirituality is simply cod psychology with a halo. Who, for example, needs the desert fathers when you’ve got John Fowler’s “Stages of Faith” (faith without an object), or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (personality without character – or spirit)? And “inner healing” remains a big buzzword on the spirituality circuit. The presumption would seem to be that God only loves those who love themselves (cf. managerialism’s “God only helps those who help themselves”), with its corollary that only as we love ourselves can we love others.

9. But this is a formula for the crassest form of works-righteousness, indeed practical atheism (cf. managerialism’s relentless pelagianism), as well as a recipe for spiritual pride – or despair. Or were the Reformers not right that God’s love for us is a free gift that has nothing whatsoever to do with self-feeling or self-construction? Can we not trust that God’s grace is sufficient to all our needs? And have not the great saints taught us that the capacity for love embraces an askesis of self-denial and the experience of woundedness?

10. Writing of the nineteenth century Abbé Marie-Joseph Huvelin, Rowan Williams observes that he “was not what many would call a whole man,” that he “lived with a sense of his own worthlessness almost unrelieved by the hope and assurance he transmitted to so many others.” And the question Williams poses is this: “can we, with our rhetoric of the identity of holiness and wholeness, begin to cope with the ‘sanctity’ of a man whose mental and emotional balance was so limited? A man less than perfectly sane. We do not here have to do simply with the question of the holy fool, but the question – harder for our day – of the holy neurotic.” A question we’d better answer before we sell a great theological heritage and spiritual tradition for a mess of Jungianism.

Surely God was a lover

Surely God was a lover, when he bade the day begin,
Soft as a woman’s eyelid – white as a woman’s skin?

Surely God was a lover when he made the trees so fair?
In every leaf is a glory caught from a woman’s hair.

—John Shaw Neilson, “Surely God Was a Lover” (1910)

Benedict XVI's encyclical: God is love

Just hours ago, Benedict XVI released his much-anticipated first encyclical, entitled “Deus caritas est” (“God Is Love”). He describes the purpose of the encyclical in these words: “To experience love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter into the world—this is the invitation I would like to extend with the present Encyclical.” The first part of the encyclical speaks of the love of God, and the second part speaks of the Church’s call to love. You can read the full text of the encyclical in English here.

One can only hope that the Holy Father will later address specific problems such as marriage, contraception and human sexuality. But regardless of these concerns, this is a profound encyclical, and it holds significant promise for the future. I’d encourage you to read it carefully. Here are some quotes:

“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.”

“[Jesus’] 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.”

“The Spirit is also the energy which transforms the heart of the ecclesial community, so that it becomes a witness before the world to the love of the Father, who wishes to make humanity a single family in his Son. The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man.”

“Christian charitable activity must be independent of parties and ideologies. It is not a means of changing the world ideologically … but it is a way of making present here and now the love which man always needs.”

“Charity, furthermore, cannot be used as a means of engaging in what is nowadays considered proselytism. Love is free; it is not practised as a way of achieving other ends.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar: love alone

Hans Urs von Balthasar is best known for his big books; but I mentioned recently the great value of his little books as well. I want to post on several of these over the next few weeks. Today, let me mention the remarkable little volume Love Alone: The Way of Revelation (London: Sheed & Ward, 1970). At only 124pp., you can read the whole thing on a single bus trip across town (I did this myself just yesterday).

The volume offers a very condensed version of the argument developed in Balthasar’s massive work The Glory of the Lord. It is a work of theological aesthetics; and Balthasar uses the term “aesthetics” in a strictly theological sense: it is our perception of the glory of God’s absolute love expressed in Jesus Christ. The book’s central theme is that God is love, and therefore he is glorious—and we perceive this glory as beauty.

God’s revelation of himself is not only true and good, but also beautiful. The beauty of God’s love is the mystery of reality; it is the true meaning of life, of existence, of being. Just as we are overwhelmed by a beautiful work of art, so God’s love overwhelms us, transforms us, brings us to ourselves, and awakens us to respond to God with love.

Here’s a quote: “The first thing that must strike a non-Christian about a Christian’s faith is that it is all too daring. It is too beautiful to be true: The mystery of being, unveiled as absolute love, coming down to wash the feet and the souls of its creatures; a love that assumes the whole burden of our guilt and hate, that accepts the accusations that shower down, the disbelief that veils God again when he has revealed himself, all the scorn and contempt that nails down his incomprehensible movement of self-abasement—all this, absolute love accepts in order to excuse his creature before himself and before the world.” (pp. 83-84)