A definition of love

I am a priest. To become a priest I had to study philosophy. The philosophy I studied is called "neo-scholastic." That means it is based on medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.

Neo-scholastic philosophy is big on definitions. You start every discussion with a definition of your terms.

Love

What is love? Everybody talks about and writes songs about it, but what IS it?

Jesus said that all the commandments can be boiled down to two: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. But what does that mean? How do you know when you are loving God or your neighbor? What IS love?

I searched for a definition for years. Here is one that half-satisfied me:

          Love is wanting to be with someone and for someone.

That is a definition based on prepositions, not completely adequate, but it served me as the best I could do.

Then I received what I consider a really adequate definition. Maybe it isn't the definitive one, but hey, nobody down through the centuries, including Thomas Aquinas and anybody else I can think of has done better.

I can say that, because I would think that if anyone has done better, we would have heard of it.

          Love is respectful, vulnerable, faithful, passionate involvement of one person with another.

I got this definition from a real philosopher, another Franciscan with whom I lived for years, John Joe Lakers. He had studied in England under people like Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose specialty was language. But "JJ" also spent thousands of hours talking with people, very often married people or people wanting to get married, or people wanting to stay married but not knowing how. He struggled for years to write a book, and finally did write one. The book was so difficult to read that he used his book-signing talk telling people why they didn't have to read it.

I read it, because I was his friend and I proof-read it for him before it got published. Even after doing that, it took me a while to discover that he was using the definition of love all through the book without actually saying it was a definition. Once I saw that it was, I was off and running.

I think that for the last 25 years, I have not preached a sermon or homily when I didn't mention the definition.

Let's break it down.

Involvement

Love is, first of all, involvement of two persons. What is involvement?

Involvement is interacting, being present to another, talking, listening, doing something together.

Involvement can take all kinds of forms. It can be "making love," or fighting, or staring at someone. It can be playing any one of the thousand games that we play with each other, using any one of the thousand masks that we wear.

Involvement can be with God too. What else is prayer besides involvement with God?

Some surveys I have read say that there are more people who pray than there are who believe in God. Pretty strong evidence of how important involvement is in our lives.

Respect

Respect is extraordinarily important in human involvement.

How many relationships are ruined by one disrespectful word? Marriage Encounter had a rule: Don't call names.

Names hurt. Names kill. "You are a slut." "You are a loser." That's all it takes, one little word. In some neighborhoods, to "diss" someone can cost you your life.

What is respect? Just courtesy, just a few rules of behavior in public. Eye contact, smile, speak, listen.

Here is one way that racism operates: A person of another color comes into the room. I am nervous, because I am afraid that I might say the wrong thing to that person. So I look away. I try not to meet the person. 

That's disrespect.

Why am I not courteous? Why can't I make genuine eye contact and smile? Our racist heritage (based on the rules required to make slavery operate) says that you never treat the slave as an equal. You must be actively discourteous. In polite society, it is courteous to your peers to be discourteous to your slaves.

When I don't respect, I don't love. And I want to love my neighbor as myself.

Vulnerability

How many stories are there about strong men who become lovable when they are forced to be vulnerable?

We often wear masks because we don't want to be hurt. I don't want you to see how afraid I am that I am not masculine enough. I don't want the teacher to know that I am dumb, so I become the class disruptor.

If God loves me, that means that God must be vulnerable. This sets off alarms. God is not supposed to be vulnerable. God is all-powerful. God cannot change. If God would be vulnerable, God wouldn't be God.

Sorry, but God loves.

Our problem is philosophy. (Who was it that talked about the "god of the philosophers"?). Aristotle thought that anything that changes has to be imperfect because presumably it changes so it can become more perfect. The goal is to arrive at the perfect state, the perfect body, the perfect building. Greek architecture created masterpieces of unchanging beauty--think of the Parthenon.

But life is change, and God created life. Isn't God more perfect when God is vulnerable?

The clincher: Jesus was vulnerable. Jesus is God. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus, don't read Aristotle.

Faithfulness

Faithfulness is being in it for the long haul.

The problem with the "one-night-stand" is that it lacks faithfulness.

Of course, we cannot be faithful with the check-out person in the grocery store in the same way we are faithful with close friends. But we can treat the check-out person with respect and vulnerability, and we can refrain from doing anything that will shut down the possibility of knowing that person better. That's being faithful--not doing things that shut off future involvement.

Here is where much of morality enters in. We do things and we refrain from doing things because we can see what will happen when we do or not do them. The script in our brain sees ahead: if I do this, it will be a lot harder for me to be involved with this person down the road.

The Ten Commandments are descriptions of behaviors that shut off future involvements with people. They are rules for faithfulness. That's true of all law.

That's why Jesus could say that if you love God and your neighbor, you have got all the rest of the Law covered. It is a minimal cover--when you add in respect and vulnerability and passion, you have the whole package and life not only goes well, it goes forever.

Passion

JJ proposed passion as the first characteristic of loving involvement. Earlier in his life he had put it second in his list of adjectives, but he moved it to first place because he saw it as so important. But I put it last because passion is not under our control. We don't create passion on demand. The very word says it: passion is passive. It is not under our control. Active voice and passive voice. Active voice: I am writing this. Passive voice: This piece is being written by me.

I'm a pretty rational guy, and I am suspicious of passion. I have often thought I don't have any passion. Marriage Encounter said that it is typical of men to think they don't have passion. But I do have it, because I notice that there are things that get me fired up.

So while passion is essential to love, the fact that you don't control it means that if you are interested in being loving--and who isn't?--you can't start with trying to be passionate. That is something that just has to come along. It is a gift. If you treat someone with respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness, passion may be given you. If it does, rejoice.