The Facts of Life: Love
One of the subtle, yet striking, aspects of Jesus’ teaching, as we see in the Gospels, is what He assumes people already know. He assumes the people of His time knew what many of their faith’s crucial concepts and guiding principles were without much review or conceptual clarification. Many times, Jesus doesn’t begin His teaching with the common men and women of that era, by defining His terms or making clear how to explain these ideas to the deeply skeptical in His audience.
He just jumps right into the deep end with virtually no preliminary philosophical justification or conceptual clarification. For instance, He speaks about “love” directly without any explanation of the personal phenomenon of love as an experience, as an emotion, as a moral imperative. He speaks about what love does, what the dispositional reality of love is, what love’s relationship to God is, for example. He even reminds His contemporaries simply and incisively about the paragon of love, that “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
But, in our modern era with our universal formal education and sophisticated science, we have come to need a larger and longer conceptual clarification to understand and to embody Jesus’ teaching, particularly about the comprehensive content of true love. For our modern skepticism and scientific materialism blinds us to the simple, yet profound, certainties of life and alienates us from the veracity and verities of our common sense, our common experience, our common intuitions.
This myopic modern mindset about love and its nature is routinely and richly evident. One such area of our modern myopia is manifest when it comes to criticism. So often in our modern lives we fail to grasp the difference between love and approval. Nowadays many take criticism to be offensive, or reject it and indulge themselves in self pity or hostility toward those offering such feedback. Many miss the loving rebuke of clear feedback and discipline, unless it is delivered with perfect tone and lengthy preambles.
Similarly, we too often assume love is solely emotional rather than a holistic harmony of morality and practicality, a comprehensive blend of our emotional, relational, intellectual and spiritual faculties, the goal and standard for our behavior and our attitude, our disposition and our discipline.
So, when we look at love as a fact of life and living, we need to understand the breadth and depth of what love truly is. We need to embrace the aspects of love so often overlooked in our modern moment. We need to understand that love is patient and love is kind, just as much as love is tough and love is challenging. We need to embody the demands of love and its requisite responsibilities and duties just as much as we receive and reciprocate the warmth of emotional love and comfort from others.
For love is a fact of life, as factual as any scientific fact, mathematical proof, or rational deduction. It is a most comprehensive and inclusive reality of human character and personality, of human inspiration and human aspiration. And, true love is only a product of regular reflection and self-discipline, of routine review of a critical and encouraging nature.
Real love rises from subordinating ourselves for the benefit and relief, for the edification and redemption of others, be they strangers or neighbors, friends or family. For real and radiant love is revealed in our actions and intentions, in our countenance and character. It manifests in our natural strengths and in our ability to transcend our weaknesses.
The love Jesus calls us to is the perfect ideal of our being and behavior, along with the ideal of our need for personal edification and for coping with human error and iniquity. For in love we find the consummate manifestation of God’s very nature in its fullness, which includes a strong sense of encouragement and hope for our individual daily development and our gradual sanctification by degree amidst the duties, distractions and decisions of our daily lives.
And, this real, radiant love constitutes and colors all of love’s many manifestations. It is the wellspring of romantic love, parental love and familial love. It is the true source of compassionate love and confrontational love, prophetic love and moral love. It is the fountain of aesthetic love and generous love, of forgiving love and persistent love. And, it is the real origin for true love’s relentless and irresistible nature.
And oddly, the truer our understanding of love and the clearer we manifest such love, the more we need His help. For only with His help can we more fully know the mind and heart of God. Only with His help can we more fully experience the real redemption, edification and transformation of our character. Only with our immediate and empowering reliance on Him can we become clearer and truer reflections of His truth, His love. Only with His abiding presence will we become a more radiant resemblance of Our Father, the very character of God Himself in and through our individual identity and personality.
For love is the means and the end of our lives and being. Love is the consummate character course for our development and perfection. Only through love do we truly become our unique individuality and a truer reflection of moral perfection and characterological completeness. Only through our surrender of our self-absorptions and self-interests, our fears, our faults and our flaws will we ever approach our fuller embodiment of love.
And, only through our richer realization of God’s very character and our routine reliance on His proximity, intimacy and activity, can we ever experience and become the fullest reflection of His love and a more complete fulfillment of love in us and through us.
Given all these implications and manifestations of love, as well as the idea and perfection of love, the people of Jesus’ day would understand that love itself is God for He is the perfect embodiment of love and the source of love’s many perfections. And, they would have known this with little deliberation or reflection, with an intuitive and immediate intellectual insight.
For the fact of love’s experience, the justice of love’s demands, the impetus of love’s enactment, the edification of love’s transformative metamorphosis all bear witness to the truth of love, to its factual nature despite its intangible essence.
The very existence of love, its intuitive insights, its intellectual profundities, its moral imperatives, its edifying experience, its practical perfections were and are definitive proof of the existence of God, the nature of God, the plan of God simultaneously. For love, as He shows us and wants us to embrace and employ in our temporal lives, is the sum and substance of His call to us, His hope for us, His relationship with us.
For as we love more regularly and more perfectly, we become real beacons of loving truth to the lost and fallen, and havens of true love to the needy and hurt. And love in its fullness shows us love is truly real. It shows us that God must be the maker of love and its perfect model.
For love in a world without God is merely a sensation, a neural event, a by-product of biochemistry in the neural networks of our brains. If neural biology is all there is to love, as many moderns believe, then love isn’t love at all. It’s nothing but biology. Nothing but a mere sensation. Such love is just a neural illusion, a deceptive and destitute delusion with no real reality or utility, a transitory sensation, an empty emotional experience.
But, love’s existence, its perfections, its truths are positive proofs of God’s existence, God’s perfect nature, God’s plan for mankind and God’s personal relationship with each one of us. And, love is not just evidence of God. It is an immediate, intimate and intense experience of Him. It is a mystical event He encourages us to seek every day of our lives with Him and with everyone we encounter. That is the calling of God upon each and every true disciple. For we will be known by our love.
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This article is the third part in an extended series on the “The Facts of Life” by F. X. Cronin. You can start with part one by clicking here and see previous entries by clicking here.
We also recommend Mr. Cronin’s latest book, The World According to God: The Whole Truth About Life and Living. It is available from your favorite bookstore and through Sophia Institute Press.
