Definition of Love

"Love is wanting and doing what is best for the other person at all times"  

If we start from the standard of perfection that Our Lord gave us:

“Greater Love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”

We realize that most of us will not be called to the sacrifice of red martyrdom. Still the fact remains that we are called to this greater sacrificial love. This calls us to lay down our lives for one another on a daily basis. We are called to become LIVING SACRIFICES! Some term this as white martyrdom which can certainly be much more difficult to do. I do not doubt that the vast majority of men would risk their lives defending their home and family from and intruder, but it may be a more daunting task to love your wife for a sharp retort or unkind word spoken to you, or your teenager for making some poor choices, or a co-workers gossip.

The Greek word for this type of love is agape. This word is most often used in the New Testament for love.

In breakng this down carefully we can further understand the definition.

"Love is wanting and doing what is best for the other person at all times"

If we stopped at the wanting and do not include the “doing” we can find ourselves in a situation described in the book of James where he states "Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? " if we then do nothing are we truly loving this person? This reduces love to a mere wish.

Or if we remove the “wanting” and only say "Love is doing what is best..." then we run the risk of substituting what God wants for this person with what we think is best. The "wanting" always inferrs that we want what is what God wants. We may also have the wrong motivation for our actions like the Pharisees whom Jesus describes as whitewashed tombs "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean." Perhaps the Pharisees were unaware of their self-deception which is why you and I must always ask ourselves "Am I doing your will here, Lord"

Inserting “for the other person” we always keep in mind our Lord’s command “to love one another as I have loved you” and thus take the focus from ourselves and the desire to have our needs met first. The ultimate goal of this "wanting and doing for the other person" is to help the other person get to heaven to be in eternal union with God. This is the highest and greatest good.

The final part “at all times” actually brings us back to the first word Love. When does Love stop "wanting and doing what is best for the other person"? When does God stop lavishing His Divine Love/Grace upon us? The answer is never, and for us this means “at all times” we are called to love one another as God has loved us. As you already may have surmised this is not a one-time event in our lives and without a doubt we must always be striving to grow in our ability to love as Jesus loves, in Greeek this type of Love God has for us is called Agape. However, there are times when we may meet someone who ignites our passion. This type of love is referred to in Greek as eros.

Now the world’s definition of eros is defined too often as merely intercourse and because of this I think many of us who grew up as Catholic/Christian have a negative connotation of eros as something bad or evil. My Catholic educational experience did little to dispel this misconception and in fact reinforced the idea of “sex is bad”. When I started giving chastity talks to high school age teens there were many great reasons to avoid sex outside of marriage. I found it especially easy to attack the “bottom feeder” guys who took advantage of girls, even if it was not their original intention. However when it came to the teens (or adults for that matter) that were in a “long term” relationship with real and intense human emotions involved there were no great reasons to wait only very good ones. Most of my research into what the Church said as well as some highly successful chastity speakers either gave some ethereal teaching that could not be put into human language, relied on some great statistics which addressed the intellect but did not speak to the human heart, or instructed us avoid these kind of relationships until you are 25 and “ready” to enter into marriage. As I said these are all good approaches that have been effective for some, but do not speak to the human heart where these strong emotional passions start. Pope John Paul II’s thorough catechesis on Theology of the Body and followed up by Pope Benedict’s first encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) look at the world’s definition of eros and condemn it outright as heresy.  That is exactly what is it is and thank God for their courage to tackle this issue. The Church has always affirmed the beauty of our human sexuality as “very good”, even holy, and the way the world screams hysterically about how the Church and Christianity condemns sex shows how the world hates the followers of Christ. Unfortunately, the worlds neurotic screeching has infiltrated the Church (especially since the sexual revolution, which I refer to not as a revolution, but as the bloodiest civil war in human history), and not until now has the Church responded boldly and definitively. Neither of the two popes stops at just condemning this heresy, but gives us real concrete and substantial teaching that satisfies the human heart and energizes us to engage the culture without fear. 

                                   Agape and Eros Meet
 
As I have stated above there are many types of love, but the highest are agape and eros. The traditional way of looking at these is that agape is the unconditional love of God for us. He loved us first though we did not merit His Love and it is a purely gratuitous gift from God. This gift was so powerful and His Love so complete that He made us in His image and likeness. This initial creation of humanity in the image and likeness of God is referred to in Theology of the Body as Original Solitude.

The traditional way of looking at eros is the erotic unitive love between a man and a woman. If we continue to hold onto the idea that we are made in His image and likeness and remember that He is Trinitarian union or communion of persons we can see also that it is in this marital union that we most image the Godhead...let me say this again it is precisely in the unity of husband and wife in the marital embrace that we most image God. We can see that if we return to Jesus’ words about “in the beginning…” we begin to get a glimpse of human love in the divine plan. We see at once the agape self-sacrificial love of Adam and Eve as well as the eros. In giving up his rib Adam was put into was ekstasis in Greek, which can be translated as ecstasy. At the very moment that Adam’s sacrificed a rib he was in ecstasy and immediately following this Adam exclaims “This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh…and the two of them become one” In this we see the self sacrifice of Adam’s rib, his “wanting and doing what is best for the other” or agape, and the coming together of husband and wife, eros. Adam and Eve demonstrated perfect unity between agape and eros as human beings. Pope Johm Paul II referrs to this as Original Unity. It was not until the fall when, confronted with Satan, that Adam did not do what was best for his bride and stand between Eve and Satan. He chose not to enter into battle with the Evil one, and sacrifice himself. It was only then that this unity between agape and eros was disrupted. It was not until Christ came and followed through with the battle with Satan that the possibility of this unity was restored.

How do we restore that which has been lost? Once again I point us back to the beginning. When God initially created mankind, man’s relationship with God was abundantly clear. Adam was in right relationship with God. He was well aware that God had created him and that all things came from Him. So Adam in his solitude had a relationship with God. When Eve came from the side of Adam and thus was created with equal dignity and with the same fullness of humanity as Adam, she too was in right relationship with God. Thus when Adam and Eve came together each of them was in relationship with God and each of them brought that relationship into the marriage. So Adam and Eve were in right relationship with God as a couple. Each of us as husbands and wives needs to have a relationship with Christ and then put our relationship with each other under the lordship of Christ. This is even more true and important today than at the time of the original couple, because even though we have the abundant Grace Christ merited for us by His sacrifice we have to work a lot harder at our relationship with Him.

It is not a coincidence that Jesus' first public miracle occurred at the wedding at Cana. In other words the first public sign of man's broken relationship with God was the disunity of the marriage of Adam and Eve and the first public sign of God's desire to restore marriage and man's relationship with God is a miracle at a wedding! Theologians note that the wine represents the Love and Grace of God and Jesus changed between 120-180 gallons of water into wine, which was way more than could be consumed at the wedding. God knew we NEEDED the additional help and this signifies a super abundance of Grace that is poured into a marriage that seeks the Love of God as its source. It is here we can see that the power and shadow of the Cross extends over all time from the very beginning with Adam and Eve and God's promise to send a redeemer to each and every marriage today.

“Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church giving himself up for her…” It is here that we see the first part of the formula for how we are to let eros be transformed by agape. Husbands sacrifice yourselves on behalf of your wife. Rightly understood this means that in humility the husband is to pray, fast, offer up the daily challenges, pains, mortifications, and if necessary his very life to God for the sanctification of his wife and the marriage. For wives this initially means you are to accept and receive your husband’s sacrifice on your behalf and pray that he will have the strength, courage, and perseverance to keep up his sacrificial offering for YOU and return to him the love he has shown for you. This is one of the reasons I love speaking to men about how they are to be as husbands. I have found that men are so lost as to how to go about bringing sanctity into their marriages. It has been my observation that when men challenge men to be what they have been called to be they respond, one of the problems is that there are far too few men out there challenging men to be men of God and to take up the battle for their wives. Just as Satan targeted Eve for his initial attack so too are our wives the initial target of the Evil one. If men were aware of this and taught how to battle through in union with Christ and other men who fight the battle we would see a dramatic reversal in the divorce rate, but in addition to this our marriages will start to ascend to the high ideal the each of us has for our marriage. We are just now seeing the beginning of what I believe will be the definitive battle for humanity. Our human sexuality has long been Satan’s primary weapon against us as human beings and we as men are beginning to finally arm ourselves with the weapons of this spiritual battle. This is no battle for the weak and faint of heart and if we avail ourselves of the Grace of the Sacraments and the prayers of the mighty faithful we will prevail in glorious and unexpected ways.

©  Copyright 2007 Chip Awalt