by CCW | 15 February 2010 10:30
Love is everything and without it we are nothing. Tough love, it seems. What is this love? Quite simply, it is the love of God, the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves.
But isn’t love, love? Love of what, in what way and for what end, we have to ask. Love is not static but dynamic. It is the desire or the eros of our souls, “the still more excellent way” that transcends and transforms our human attempts at justice and right.
Divine charity perfects human charity. In the divine fellowship, the true desire of our souls for the unity that unites all differences is accomplished and concluded. Such love cannot be an indifferent love, a love that is indifferent to the realities of our lives and the lives of others around us. Love indifferent is not love. The love that is sung in this Hymn of Love is the divine love which seeks our good, individually and collectively.
“Now abideth faith, hope and charity; but the greatest of these is charity.” Charity is the Englishing of the Latin caritas. “Love seeks not its own,” Paul notes. Precisely. Charity seeks the good of others. The works of charity are the motions of divine love at work in us.
That is the great insight of this powerful and compelling hymn of love. Without the divine love moving in us, our human loves and actions, from the greatest to the least, are “nothing worth,” as the Collect puts it. That is to say, they are radically incomplete when they are utterly disconnected from the source of all goodness and truth. The divine love which is charity unites our knowing, faith, and our willing, hope, and suggests that we already participate in the mystery of perfect love, the divine communion. We participate but with varying degrees of awareness. Yet what is wanted is that we continue on the way of love, continuing to learn the lessons of love in our lives.
It is not always easy. Love’s lessons are life-long and there are many moments of illumination along the way, lessons, too, that are learned through suffering, lessons that are learned through the passionate desire for learning that makes us, we hope, better people, precisely because we do not seek our own. But it means discovering our unknowing. To know that we do not know is the beginning of the possibilities of learning and belongs entirely to the journey of love.
Jesus talks about a journey. “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem.” He explains “the things that shall be accomplished” there, the things of his passion. Those things are the lessons of love, the divine love that lays down his life for us. We are, of course, blind and indifferent to such lessons. Jesus tells us what the journey means. The Church proclaims year-in and year-out the things belonging to the character of our spiritual lives, providing us with a way to think about ourselves and God. But now as then, “they” and we “understood none of these things.”
It is hard to contemplate the forms of willful blindness that get in the way of the vision of perfecting love. To see here means wanting to see, like the blind man calling out from the way-side. It means wanting to see with the whole of our being, wanting to “know even as we are known” as Paul puts it. It takes charity, love, the strong desiring love that seeks to know and to serve. That love in us shares in the same quality of love that Christ, the love of God makes known to us. Love is sacrifice, the total giving over of ourselves for the good of others and for the love of God.
To seek the good of others does not mean mere niceness. If it is not right to give back to a madman the ax that is his because he may hurt himself or others, it can hardly be right to think that charity is about letting yourself be walked over by others. It can’t be about giving what you don’t have; it can’t be about abuse. Human charity is always limited. So often we confuse charity with letting others have their way without regard for whether or not that is good for them or for us. In other words, love that is indifferent to truth can neither be good nor true.
There is, perhaps, no greater challenge than to see all the various parts of our lives as forms of love. It challenges the easy, cheesy sentimentalism of our world and day that diminishes and debases love to the religion of Hallmark Cards, the love that is mere emotion and feeling. It challenges, too, the false forms of charity that confuse charity with groveling subservience to tyrannous authority. Sacrifice isn’t in the picture and yet sacrifice is the truer reality of many of your lives. Your lives of love are about the sacrifices that you make for others – your children, your families, your communities, your parish. At issue, is how we do it and to what extent and whether we do it knowingly and in truth or simply by a kind of accident and happenstance of character or circumstance.
We only begin to learn the lessons of love truly by entering into the pilgrimage of love signified by Lent. Lent is the salutary and honest reminder about the true nature of our lives. Seeing the journey of our souls as the journey of love brings honour and truth, compassion and commitment, to the sacrifices of our lives. Our loves, wounded and broken, scattered and in ruins, are gathered up into something redemptive and wonderful. But only if we enter into the disciplines of Lent. They are the big, little lessons of love in which divine love perfects human love. The disciplines of “prayer, fasting and self-denial”, along with “self-examination and repentance” and “by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word”, are all the lessons of love. They are the forms of charity that seek the perfection of our humanity.
Love-tokens. God gives us the tokens and signs of his love for us. He is with us in the journey of our souls to him and he provides for us the food of our wayfaring. Such are the sacraments and, in particular, the sacrament of Holy Communion. Nothing can concentrate our minds more wonderfully on the idea of God going with us on the journey to Jerusalem than the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, the very means of our entering into the divine love so wondrously poured out on the cross. There is no other way than the way of love, the way of passionate desire. There is “no other path”, as Bonaventure puts it, than “through that most burning love for the crucified.” Will we understand these things? Only if we care enough to learn. That means love. Without it we are nothing and nothing worth.
Fr. David Curry
8:00am
Christ Church in the Hall
Quinquagesima 2010
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/02/15/sermon-for-quinquagesima-800am-service/
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