Monday, January 30, 2006
DEUS CARITAS EST
God Is Love. Such a simple phrase with such profound depths. If we get the love aspect wrong, we will not be able to understand who God is. If we get the God aspect wrong, we will be unable to love in a way that is satisfying to our very nature. God and love are inseparable. We must have both in order to have either.
Our culture would tell us that is a patent absurdity. Love is one of the most overused words in our vocabulary. We love our parents. We love the color of our new sofa. We love the autumn leaves and the summer sunshine. We love the Lexus in front of us at the stoplight. We love our new baby. We love potato chips. We love the way our new girlfriend makes love. Can each of these uses of the word mean the same thing? Obviously not.
What shapes our concept of love? As Christians, we take our clues from Scripture. So did our Pope. His encyclical focused on the Gospel of John. Why John, specifically?
I’m not a mind reader, but I can tell you that St. John has earned a place of honor where he would least wish it—in the Gnostic community which is growing rapidly in our midst. It is St. John who is used to promote views that conflict with the Roman Catholic faith. For example, in the book GNOSTICISM: NEW LIGHT ON THE ANCIENT TRADITION OF INNER KNOWING, Stephan A. Hoeller, Bishop of the Ecclesia Gnostica, writes:
Another Gnosticizing…apostle was St. John, who frequently wrote of knowing…God or Christ. Anyone who reads the beautiful Gospel of John is struck by its similarity to the poetic and visionary style of the writings of the Gnostics.(p. 7)
Freemasonry, long an enemy of the Catholic Church, also honors St. John, as the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania explains in a question and answer website:
68. Who was St. John the Evangelist?
One of the Apostles, born in Galilee and known for his effective preaching in Asia Minor and at Ephesus. A man of great energy and poetic fire, he became one of the Patron Saints of Freemasonry, earning that distinction because of his constant cultivation of Brotherly Love. The day consecrated as the Festival of St. John the Evangelist, December 27th, at High Noon, is the beginning of a new Masonic Year in Pennsylvania.
What’s wrong with “inner knowing” and “brotherly love”? It all depends on how you define them. If the “inner knowing” begins with the morning offering when we give ourselves and our day to God, nothing is wrong with it. God seeks relationship with us. He seeks to mold us into the best that we can be. We are never more truly human and truly ourselves than when we conform our wills to God’s will. The prayer that Jesus offered in Gethsemene is the prayer we all must learn to pray, “Not my will Lord, but Thine be done.” Where people get stuck is in the desire to control, to take back, to be in charge, to have power. Gnosticism tends to teach self-importance. The Gnostic “knowing” that grants power via magical formulas violates the First Commandment.
Neither is there anything wrong with “brotherly love” so long as we don’t make of it a substitute for our relationship with God, or an alternative way to save our own souls as opposed to recognizing that our redemption rests in the sacrifice of Calvary.
I believe Benedict focused specifically on St. John in an effort to counteract the Gnostic teachings. I believe he is trying to correct the errors.
“Eros” looms large in the first part of Deus Critas Est. For an old bachelor, this is one savvy Pope. Did you ever think you’d read the word “eros” in an encyclical?
Eros is sexual. The love story in Scripture—the Song of Songs—celebrates eros, and it is the image that our theologians have chosen to explain our relationship with God. The Church is the bride of Christ. The sexual act is generative. It brings babies. It cooperates with the God of creation in the process of making human beings. God, too, is eros. Just look around you and see the things that He has made. And don’t forget to look in the mirror. Eros generates everything that is good.
Eros is relational. Just as Christ sees in the Church His beloved bride, so He sees in each member of the Church His beloved adopted child. He seeks an intimate moment to moment relationship with us. He wants to know us as we barely even know ourselves. He notices when we stub our toe and when we say our prayers. He listens when we talk to Him, and that relationship is what makes us “priestly people.”
Benedict is trying with this encyclical to take eros back from the culture that has perverted it into a practice of lust. That is the danger in eros. Because it is generative, for us it is sexual. It is sensual. It is passionate. It is emotional. These are all areas where we human creatures are vulnerable, and so we have rules that help us to avoid falling into the traps that can destroy us. It is not the Church that has “been opposed to the body” as Benedict puts it. Rather it is the culture that has opposed the body by making of it “a commodity…to be bought and sold.”
In fact we sell sex, and not only the prostitute does it. We see the body as a toy to be played with. Our senses become a sales pitch for the sex game. From our clothing, to our advertisements, to our songs, someone is always trying to persuade us to sell our toy by buying their product. Sex has been robbed of its primary ingredient which is relationship, and left with nothing to recommend it but a physical sensation, quickly come and gone, leaving nothing we value in its wake. Abortion is an ultimate expression of our confusion about the nature of eros. Sexual abuse—especially of a child—is another.
It has struck me repeatedly that the priests who abused the laity's children had no concept of what a child means to a parent. As every parent knows the child of their sexual union is unlike other children. Eros--the relational aspect of eros--extends to the children that it brings into the world, making of them the most wonderful children their parents have ever known. It's proverbial that there is no love that rises to the defense of the child quite as fierce as a mother's love. We can see this in the animal kingdom. Messing with the offspring of a mother animal is asking for trouble, especially if she is large. That is not philia we see. It is not agape. It is the highly charged eros rising to the defense of the defenseless. Perhaps if the priests who thought they could abuse the laity's children had looked more carefully at the animal kingdom, they would have thought twice.
Eros does not have an unlimited capacity to bond. Its purpose is to cement a lifetime commitment, first and foremost with our God, then with our children, but most especially with our spouse through its sexual aspect which must be reserved for only this one person. Once the marriage is consummated, we have set our course for a lifetime to be linked with that chosen other. We have taken on whatever burdens the other carries and made them our own. Even when death separates us we are still linked in prayer. From our wedding day we walk in tandem even on the days we would wish to walk alone. From that day forward we have given ourselves away and no longer belong to ourselves. Once a child is born of that sexual union, the evidence of it exists forever. A husband and wife are one flesh in their child, literally. The marriage is cast in eternity in the body of the child who will live forever.
Our culture tells us we can abandon this commitment, and we do abandon it. Our faith tells us that doing so is not possible. It is eros that precludes it. It is the sexual relationship that seals our future and makes of us a different person. That same sexual relationship makes commitment possible even through the trials it inevitably brings. Eros is the grace of family. It is in learning that we can depend upon that relationship that we move further along the path toward total dependence on God, which is the source of our only hope for happiness in a fallen world.
Misusing and breaking the sexual bond of eros damages our ability to form relationships. If we defy the nature of eros often enough, we will be unable to form any committed relationship, not only with the opposite sex, but also with God; and love will become something we spend a lifetime seeking but never find. In our culture we are all familiar with the woman, hardened by repeated sexual encounters lacking in commitment, who has become emotionally unreachable. She hates men. The woman scorned, especially when it has happened repeatedly, wears her anger on the outside for all the world to suffer from.
And so we have been given guidelines that the world sees as restrictions. We are told what not to do so that we won’t plunge ourselves into a state of inability to love. We are told how to use and how not to use this mysterious grace of eros. We are told so that we will know God by knowing love. As Benedict put it:
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”.
While the world tells us that eros is erotica, our faith says something else.
I am fortunate to have lived long enough to plumb its greater depths. When the passionate blaze of youth has burned down to a glowing ember, a different aspect of eros begins to emerge. These are the days when a look speaks for a lifetime of knowing yet demands nothing more; when a kiss may be the start, and the finish; and a hand held conveys a tenderness born of knowing the time grows shorter. These are the sweet days of retreat into the world of “Do you remember” that no one else can enter; when a face that youth would reject is the one face in all the world that matters most.
This is the fulfillment of eros that we have to work a lifetime to attain. In the love of a faithful spouse who knows your faults, you can sample the love of God who never abandons. The world with its erotic promises that don’t deliver never knew eros and never will. The joys the world promises are an empty shadow when compared with the real thing. Don’t listen to the world’s wisdom and forfeit the wisdom of God. Don’t sacrifice the rock solid foundation to chase the glitter.
The rules God gave are prisons only when judged by shallow standards. When the true meaning of eros is discovered, they become the walls that safeguard the far greater treasure that living by them offers.
