I have seen love
A young priest who had been studying with us in Rome, was saying goodbye to our
community. He said just a few words but they left a lasting impression on every one
of us. “Not only did I get to know the Brothers of Charity, I also experienced the love
among the brothers.” No, we could not have had a more beautiful compliment from
our friend who was saying goodbye.
“See how they love one another” (Tertullian) was also the mark of the first
Christians; it became their hallmark, as it were. And we know how often Christians
gave a counter-testimony exactly by bearing witness to the opposite: the lack of
mutual love.
Every Christian community should be a school of love, a ‘schola amoris’. We had an
ornamental plate in our house that had a saying, which loosely translated as: “Love
can only dwell, life only is sweet, where you do everything for each other with a
quiet and open heart.” I have read it so often that it still springs to mind once in a
while. And I can say that it was lived and experienced; it was both an encouragement
and an acknowledgement.
Only there life is sweet… Where mutual love reigns, life will be pleasant, sweet. As
religious, we keep the best memories of those communities where we lived together
in a loving way. We understand why Father Triest, founder of the Brothers and
Sisters of Charity, gave his sisters the motto “Cor unum, anima una” – one heart, one
soul.
Where people live together, mutual love is like a delicate plant. It needs enough light
and enough water. Some claim that we should talk to our plants, and I have indeed
experienced that when I returned after being away for quite a long time, a plant had
lost all of its leaves despite the excellent care of a confrere. But let us stick to light and
water to continue our reflection on mutual love.
The first condition for a plant to stay alive and continue to grow, is that it needs light.
It is both simple and essential, and it also applies to our love for each other. The first
condition is again that God’s love shines upon it. Our human love shares in the
brokenness of our human nature. It lacks the harmony in which man once lived: the
harmony with God, with oneself, and with the neighbour. It is a broken harmony.
Man feels threatened by God, by himself, and by the neighbour. Within, we carry the
wounds that were caused by evil. As far as our neighbour is concerned, this is
reflected in constantly matching ourselves against each other, in an over-
sensitiveness to what others say or do, in thinking that we are better than others.
Mutual love so easily changes into indifference, envy, hatred. The worm of envy is
never far away, and so often we allow our love to depend on the others’ behaviour
and attitude. In a word, we are all hurt, hurt in our ability to love.
Fractures, injuries, and wounds require healing.
Our wounded love has but one Healer: God, who can restore our human love to its
original pure state. It is an in-depth recovery, but it does require a constant
intervention of the divine Healer. That is why we must be open to God’s love every
day, be aware and increasingly become aware that God is there with his love for us.
God’s love must shine upon our human love and raise it to a divine level. If our
human love is limited, conditional, totally dependent on our emotions, it will become
unlimited, unconditional, and radical through divine love. God’s love will shine in
and through our human love.
More than that, through our human love, transformed by divine love, people start to
experience that God is love. God’s love needs human love to manifest itself in the
world. It is as though the incarnation is continued by it; God manifest himself
through man and in man, and as such He aims to establish his kingdom among men.
That which happened in Mary, should also take place in us: that fundamental
openness to the Word of God so that the Word might become alive within us. “You
see before you the Lord's servant, let it happen to me as you have said,” should also
be our words. It is that which Christ was constantly wondering, how He could fulfil
the will of his Father.
When the Word of God starts to live within us, when we place ourselves under his
will, God’s love will present itself in us and fulfil us. God’s love is like God’s grace: it
requires us to be open to it as men and to respond to it. It becomes our participation.
Again, it is like Mary and the Incarnation: she is asked to open up to God’s invitation
and to take part in it. She will have to renew her consent daily, be faithful to it, and
from now on take every step in her life with God. It is her walking with God’s Word,
with God’s grace, with his love.
We must also make that double movement in our lives: open ourselves to the light of
God’s love and continue to walk in that light.
This is where we make the transition from a rather passive being open to a more
active walking the path. In addition to placing our plant in the light we must also
give it water. The love for the neighbour needs to be nurtured, and our human effort
of nurturing should be entrusted to God’s grace.
In everything that we undertake, a continuous purification should take place,
including in our mutual love.
On the one hand, we are all longing for love and, on the other, we experience how
difficult it is to live this love in a pure way and to extend it to several people.
Selfishness is present in all of our actions, and therefore in love, as well, and in love it
manifests itself in desire. We wish to have our friend all to ourselves, and, instead of
approaching him with open arms, it turns into selfish grasping.
True love, however, always involves gift and surrender. I open myself to the love of
my friend and I ask myself what I can do for him, what I can mean to him. In this
mutual openness, love can flourish.
In love, the other’s well-being is the most important thing, and we rejoice when the
other is happy.
Purified love is always a love that is considerate of the other in which the other’s
well-being takes precedence over personal pleasure. It will always be our task, even
in the most intimate love, to purify the desire for pleasure and ultimately find
pleasure in the well-being of others.
In every love of friendship – for this is what we are discussing – the sting of desire is
hidden. We need to realise this, we must not be afraid to say it, we must not neglect
it or act as though it does not exist. If we close our eyes to it, it might happen that it
continues to grow silently and suddenly takes us by surprise with great violence. We
are “neither angel nor beast” but as men we have the task to free desire from its
selfishness and transform it into a positive force that can add more depth, more
intensity, call it more fruitfulness to our love. We should stand before God with our
desire and pray that He will restore it to its original pure state. For desire as a
passion is not wrong as such but it has been corrupted by evil and transformed into a
selfish grasping.
We must allow our human love with its desire to be shined upon by God’s love so
that it might once again be tied to its divine roots. It is the first task that we face:
allowing love to grow naturally in our hearts, being glad to share a life of love with
others, but making sure that this love remains pure and is purified still.
Love has the power to boost this growth process within but it will grow to perfection
if it is rooted in its true origin, in God’s love.
The love of friendship grow naturally when it comes to a number of people who we
consider our friends, and it is a true grace to be able to live in such love of friendship.
We should cherish it, put energy into it, make good time for it.
At the same time, we must try to keep this love of friendship open. We cannot expect
that all with whom we live become our friends but we should keep that possibility
open.
The obligatory fraternal and sororal love that we develop for those for whom we feel
no love of friendship whatsoever, should find nourishment in the fruits of the love of
friendship. Perhaps we could say that our ability to love grows in our love of
friendship and enables us to love those for whom we emotionally feel nothing at all,
even for those who repel us.
Of course, this is where we enter the heart of the commandment of love that was
given to us by Jesus with the urging invitation to love those who do not love us at all.
Every community that we are part of will probably consist of the following groups: a
number of friends with whom we share the love of friendship, a number of people
with whom we have no problem to lovingly live together in peace and mutual
respect, and a few people we have to place under the commandment of love for
whom we have to make an effort to approach them in a loving fashion. Perhaps it
was this combination of love that our priest-student had noticed in our community.
In his search for love and friendship, Saint Augustine came to realise that it was not
possible to be friends with everyone. However, he said, we should keep the
possibility of friendship open for everyone. Friendship should grow on both sides,
and that is why we, from our side, should ask ourselves what stands in our way to
allow friendship to grow.
If we believe and profess that God is love and that He created us out of his love and
because of his love and that He gave us the neighbour to share in this divine love, we
cannot but put a great deal of energy into love and into friendship as the place of
love. And, at the same time, we should realise that, before all things, love is a gift to
which we should simply be open.