Sunday October 29, 2017
Love Is a Decision
I was "sixteen going on seventeen" when I first "fell in love." Maura was my seatmate on the three-hour bus ride to Lough Derg in the northern part of Ireland. It is one of the few ancient places of penance remaining in the world today. People go there to spend three days fasting, without sleep and walking barefoot on the penitential paths of sharp stones.
The very moment Maura sat beside me I felt, as I had never felt before, a tingling excitement in my body and person. The bus trip seemed to take only a few short minutes. During the next few days we did everything we possibly could together. While others complained later about the sharpness of the stones, the lack of sleep and food, we giggled and did not seem to know what they were talking about because we were having such a good time. Falling in love is a wonderful thing. It is wonderful to be drawn out of self-consciousness to desire and to feel desired and valued and wanted by another human being. But "falling in love" is not "being in love." "Falling in love" is a feeling that has a biological basis; it is part of the normal attraction of the sexes. The feeling of love is a temporary thing and it will die there if there is not a decision to love, a will to love.
One of the great insights that have come to us from the Marriage Encounter is that love is a decision not a feeling. Husbands and wives vow to love one another in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, until death parts them. This is a decision, not a feeling. True love means to love even during a time when there are no more feelings, or even negative feelings.
Dr. Scott Peck defines love as, "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth" (A Road Less Traveled, p. 85). I like this definition because it shows that love is a decision in the will to extend oneself. It is therefore going to cost something; it is going to make one have to go beyond one's natural lazy self. Then this definition includes self-love with love for another. Since I am human and you are human, to love means to love myself as well as you. We are incapable of loving another unless we love ourselves. If my stretching to love you is destructive, not just painful to me, then it is not true love.
When Jesus was asked in today's Gospel which was the greatest - of the more than 600 laws that the Pharisees had - he answered, "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second resembles it: You must love your neighbor as yourself." In this he was not talking about feelings but about a decision to be totally for God and then totally for the good of one's neighbor as one should be for one's own good.
When we pray our mantra or prayer word in Christian meditation or in centering prayer, we are observing this first commandment and also the first commandment of the Mosaic Law, "I am the Lord your God, you shall not have strange gods before me." Often when we come to prayer we are asking God to give us our false gods of Success, Power, Prestige and Possessions. We often desire warm feeling and feelings of spiritual success or power or prestige. In wordless silence we ask nothing. We will to be with God who is truth. As we do this, God's light will show up the selfishness and falseness that is in us and in our relationships to ourselves and to others. It will call on us to see reality as it really is and to decide to be for ourselves and for others in the most up building possible way.
Often people, who make a seminar or retreat, fall in love with God. This is a wonderful feeling as was my feeling for Maura, my first love. This thrill and intoxication can lead people to promise to do extraordinary things for the Lord. But it is not true love, tested love. Tested love is a love that does not dry up when the well runs dry. It is a decision to be for the Lord in good times and in bad. It needs to be supported by a prayer form that is a decision to be for and with the one we love now and forever.
