Is this a lasting treasure
Or just a moment’s pleasure?
—THE SHIRELLES1
Benedict XVI summarizes well where this book has taken us so far and where we still need to go when he writes that “love promises infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence. Yet we have also seen that the way to attain this goal is not simply by submitting to instinct. Purification and growth in maturity are called for; and these also pass through the path of renunciation. Far from rejecting or ‘poisoning’ eros, they heal it and restore its true grandeur.”2
Without this healing and restoration, eros “is not an ‘ascent’ in ecstasy toward the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man.”3 Without this healing and restoration, we pursue happiness in erotic love, but we find heartache. We seek to be lifted up but are pulled down. Salvation in Christ reaches us right here—in our pain, in our disillusionment, in our broken hearts, and, yes, in our erotic yearnings. As Father Raniero Cantalamessa affirms, Christ has “come to ‘save’ the world, beginning with eros, which is the dominant force.”4 This is a dramatic and important assertion: the work of salvation begins with eros because eros is the dominant force. And the salvation of eros has one final purpose: to reorient us toward our heavenly destiny and enable us to attain it.
We see Christ beginning his work of salvation with eros at his first miracle. He comes to a wedding feast in Cana where the couple has run out of wine. What is the symbolism here? John Paul II observes that the lack of wine can be interpreted as an allusion to the lack of love that threatens the relationship between man and woman.5 Since the dawn of sin, eros has been cut off from agape (divine sacrificial love). Or, to go with the symbolism of Cana, eros has run out of “God’s wine.” Christ’s first miracle is to restore the wine to eros in superabundance.
Superabundance is an understatement: the six water jars that were filled to the brim held twenty to thirty gallons each (see John 2:6). Average it out and that’s 150 gallons of “the best wine”—about 750 bottles. Oh the extravagance of the salvation Jesus pours out on us! And he wants us to drink up! Indeed, the goal of the Christian life from this perspective is to get utterly plastered on God’s wine. Do you remember that on the day of Pentecost, when the love of God descended upon the apostles, some among the crowd accused them of being drunk (see Acts 2:13–15)? Yep, they were drunk on God’s “delicious and strong wine,” as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux describes it.6 “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink!” (John 7:37).
We should certainly rejoice in this delicious and strong wine, but before we get too giddy let us keep in mind that this wine, which is an allusion to the Eucharist, is poured out for us through Christ’s suffering and death. The agony and the ecstasy, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, go together in the Christian life. And this means that authentic love always involves the cross. Love makes demands on us—radical demands. It’s easy to resent those demands, especially when lust promises the same fulfillment without those demands. It’s precisely here, in the lure we feel toward satisfying desire without accepting love’s demands, that we must take our stand in choosing to love love—which is to say, in choosing to embrace the cross.
I remember, for example, during a time when both my wife and I were feeling the radical demands of love, how easy it was to catch myself dreaming about an “easier life”—with another woman, not being married at all, you name it. The temptation was to escape, to “come down from my cross.” Jesus experienced the same temptation, and he remained bound to that harsh tree unto death. In doing so, he exercised a remarkable freedom: “No one takes my life from me, I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18).
We can see in Christ’s free gift of love that loving love and freeing freedom are closely related. Freedom exists for the sake of love. Indeed, we’re not meant to “store up” freedom for ourselves. We’re meant to “spend” our freedom on love. But to the degree that we’re enslaved by lust, we have no freedom to spend on love. We must free our freedom precisely so we can spend it on love. And only if we truly love love will we have the necessary motivation to endure the exacting work of freeing freedom. If we love lust instead of loving love, then we will see no need to free freedom from lust. We will simply indulge in our lusts and call it love.
It’s certainly true that love and lust can sometimes be difficult to distinguish. A man, for example, upon recognizing a woman’s beauty might wonder where the line is between treating her as an object for his own gratification and properly admiring her beauty as a person. But this question only arises among those who love love. Those who love lust aren’t even aware of the need to make such distinctions. Lust holds sway in their hearts and they just go with it.
What we often call “love” in the sexual relationship, if we’re honest enough to look at it plainly, amounts to little more than two people using each other. Lust impels people very powerfully toward physical intimacy. But if such “intimacy” grows out of nothing more than a selfish desire for physical and/or emotional gratification, it’s not love; it’s the opposite of love.7 For the opposite of love in this case is not hatred, it’s use. As our own painful experience confirms, to use a person as a means to an end or to be used in this way is contrary to the very nature and meaning of love. And it hurts.
I’m going back almost thirty years here, but I can remember very clearly the first time I felt used by a girl. I was in eighth grade, and a girl I liked “made out with me,” so she said afterward, just to have a story to tell her friends. I felt cheap. Disposable. And I remember resolving in my pain: Fine, if this is how it works, I’ll just harden my heart and play the game so I don’t get hurt again. Truth be told, I can also see how I was using her, and maybe her dismissal of what happened between us was her way of defending her own wounded heart. Regardless, it set me on a path of using and being used, and calling it “love.” It wasn’t until my college years that I started facing up to what I was doing and how it was harming me and others. The emotional wreckage I witnessed in the promiscuity of college dorm life made me start asking some big questions, like What is love anyway?
Society says a lot about love and “falling in love,” but what does falling in love mean? Is love something we merely fall into? What role does the will play? Is love a feeling? A sensual attraction? An emotion? A decision? What is the proper relationship between desiring my own fulfillment and working for the good of the other? These are some of the questions that John Paul II explored in great length in his pre-papal book Love and Responsibility.
There we learn that emotions, feelings, and sensual attraction constitute only the “raw material” of love. There exists a misguided tendency to consider them the finished form of love.8 I might find myself attracted emotionally or physically to any number of people I encounter. Should I tell my wife I have “fallen in love with another woman” just because I felt a certain attraction to someone?
It’s obvious that emotions and attractions are fickle and can be misguided. We need to engage our will in order to gather up this “raw material” and build something with it worthy of the name love. For we cannot properly give the name love to something that is only a particular element of love. In fact, these various elements of love, “if they are not held together by the correct gravitational pull, may add up not to love, but to its direct opposite.”9 This correct gravitational pull is found in the proper balance between love understood as desire for one’s own good and love understood as benevolence in desiring and working for the good of the other.
As we observed at the start of this book, the yearning of eros reveals that we are incomplete, that we are in search of another to make sense of ourselves, to complete us, to “fill-full” what we lack. This is expressed in the well-known passage from Genesis: “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18)—and this is man in the generic sense, all of us, not just the male. If it is not good for a person to be alone, then it is good for us to seek the completion of our humanity in an “other.” This is part of the very nature of eros. Love understood as desire recognizes the other as a good and desires that other because that person is good for me, that person completes me. In this way, that person and the love we share become a sign of our ultimate destiny: union with God forever, completion in God forever.
But love as desire is not the whole essence of authentic love between persons. It’s not enough to long for a person as a good for oneself. One must also, and above all, long for the other person’s good.10 If one’s love is only about fulfilling oneself, then we end up not with love, but with egoism. If one is not committed to sacrificing oneself for the other’s true good, then love as desire degenerates into love as use, which is not love at all.
Selfless desire for the other’s true good is called benevolence in love. If love as desire says, “I long for you as a good,” love as benevolence says, “I long for your good,” and “I long for that which is good for you.” Love as desire is not itself a problem or a defect; it is merely incomplete. It must be balanced out with love as benevolence. The person who truly loves longs not only for his or her own good, but for the other person’s good, and he does so with no ulterior motive, no selfish consideration. This is the purest form of love, and it brings the greatest fulfillment.11
I remember the day I knew Wendy would be my wife. It was the day I realized she loved me with this kind of disinterested benevolence. Sad to say, such a love was foreign to me at the time. It caught me so off guard that I could barely believe it was real.
Wendy and I were part of the same group of friends in our college years. I had no idea, however, that over the course of about three years she was hoping and praying that one day I would be her husband. My obliviousness to Wendy’s interest in me was due in part to the fact that during those same years I was interested in another person in the group, a girl named Laura. Various external factors (mainly Laura’s father) had kept Laura and me from ever dating officially, and the whole tangled affair had caused me a lot of pain.
As Wendy and I grew closer, she once asked me why Laura and I had never dated. I, for my part, was very reluctant to say anything, because I had just learned how interested Wendy had been in me during the whole time I was interested in Laura. I was certain—based on my experience with other women—that sharing the story with Wendy would only make her insecure, jealous, and upset. But she seemed so sincere in her desire to know about it that I ended up sharing the whole painful saga.
Sure enough, she got all teary and emotional. I knew it! I knew it! I thought to myself. I never should have told her! Then, to my utter astonishment, as Wendy opened up to me, I realized that her tears were for me—that she was feeling my pain. She went on to tell me that for some time she had known that something was preventing Laura and me from dating, so she had been praying that whatever the obstacle was it would be removed and Laura and I would be able to pursue a relationship.
I couldn’t believe my ears. “What!? Excuse me … Run that by me again … You’re telling me that you were hoping to marry me all that time, but when you found out Laura and I wanted to be together but couldn’t be, you started praying that Laura and I would get together?!”
“Yes,” she said. “Wasn’t that what you wanted?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, “but why did you want that for me?”
“Because love means you lay down your life and your own desires for the good of the other,” she said.
I had never experienced such a selfless love from a woman who was romantically interested in me. I was utterly flabbergasted. And I knew then I would never let this woman go.
Once again, let’s acknowledge that erotic love is without a doubt a search for completion in the other. But as love matures, it becomes more and more an unqualified benevolence—a desire to uphold the good of the other and work for the good of the other, even at great cost to oneself. As love matures, we focus less on how the other person makes me feel and more on the unrepeatable value and dignity of the other person. And this is a love for the other person as he or she really is, not as the person of our imagination, not as the person we wish him or her to be, but the real person—warts and all.
“The strength of such a love emerges most clearly,” John Paul II tells us, “when the beloved person stumbles, when his or her weaknesses or even sins come into the open. One who truly loves does not then withdraw his love, but loves all the more, loves in full consciousness of the other’s shortcomings and faults … For the person as such never loses its essential value.”12
However, when love is based only on the pleasure and “good feelings” the other person can give me, that “love” will last only as long as those good feelings. When the other person’s faults, shortcomings, and sins are revealed—which inevitably happens and inevitably causes me to suffer—the shoddy foundation of our love is also revealed, and the illusion of love bursts like a bubble.13 Only when love reaches the value of the person, which is inexhaustible, does it have a foundation that lasts forever.
The Italian author Rocco Buttiglione put it this way: “Only the value of the person can sustain a stable relationship. The other values of sexuality are wasted away by time and are exposed to the danger of disillusion. But this is not the case for the value of the person,” he observes, “which is stable and in some way infinite. When love develops and reaches the person, then it is forever.”14 And when love is forever, we’re experiencing a human love that truly points us to our divine destiny.
Mature love is attracted not just by the sexual attributes or qualities of a person that light a “spark” in me. Attraction to such qualities can form the “raw material” of love, but if love stops merely at a person’s pleasing and attractive qualities (sexual or otherwise), a permanent shadow is cast over the permanency of the relationship. Why? Because a person’s qualities change with time. Furthermore, qualities are repeatable—attractive qualities can always be found in others and to a “more pleasing” degree. Individual persons, however, are unrepeatable—they can never be compared to, measured by, or replaced by another.
Love that hankers after what is merely pleasing and repeatable in a person will do just that: repeat itself with whoever possesses those pleasing qualities. In this case, the inherent “adventurousness” of love—the desire for expansion, growth, and new discoveries—will lead a person to take his delight in wandering from person to person. On the other hand, love that reaches the unrepeatable mystery of the other person is a love that’s truly that: unrepeatable, stable, sure. It’s an inexhaustible treasure that can’t possibly be found elsewhere. In this case, love’s inherent adventurousness finds its delight not in wandering from person to person, but from wandering ever more deeply into the heart of the one and only beloved.
Let’s face it: life continually offers equally or more seductive possibilities of new sexual relationships—especially in today’s world. If the person I “love” is only an instrument for my own pleasure, then he or she can easily be replaced, and the inevitable result is an atmosphere of fear and anxiety in the relationship: Am I truly loved? Will I be abandoned for another? The case is different when love reaches the value of the other person. Then the other is loved not merely for the pleasing qualities that he or she has (and which one can lose or which others could have in a higher degree) but for his or her own sake, for his or her true and unrepeatable value as a person. Only then is the sexual relationship something more than selfishness. Only then is the sexual relationship based on something stable and lasting.15
When love stops at a person’s “pleasing repeatables,” it’s a case of the raw material of love failing to take shape in its finished form. Not that love is ever “finished,” but stopping at the “pleasing repeatables” stunts love’s growth at the very start of what should be embraced as an ongoing process of growth and maturation. And when love’s growth is stunted, eros degenerates quickly into egoism and lust.
The person who is the object of such lust gradually realizes the sentiment of the other person: “You don’t love me. You don’t desire me. You desire only a means of gratification.” Far from feeling loved and affirmed as a unique and unrepeatable person, those objectified by lust feel used and debased as a replaceable commodity, and they live under the constant fear of one day being discarded for someone more “pleasing.”
Don’t we long to be loved as we are, for who we really are, and not just for whatever it is we have that may “please” someone else? Don’t we know deep in our hearts that we are never meant to be compared to another, measured against another, or replaced by someone else? Don’t we long deep in our hearts to be loved in such a way that we are honored and recognized as indispensable, irreplaceable, and unrepeatable? And doesn’t it pain our hearts grievously when others treat us merely as objects that can be disposed of and replaced—that is, when others toy with us?
These universal “truths of the heart” were portrayed with remarkable and surprising insight in, of all films, Toy Story 3 (2010). Little Andy from the previous films isn’t so little anymore. In fact, he’s headed off to college, and he hasn’t played with his toys for years. When the toys steal Andy’s cell phone so that their old friend will have to open the toy chest, so they can be seen, you can feel their yearning for love. Andy lifts Rex the dinosaur (voiced again by the “in-con-scchhievable” Wallace Shawn) in order to retrieve his phone, and, once the coast is clear, Rex exclaims with unbridled elation: “He touched me! He touched me!” There it is—the cry of the heart to be loved, to be touched … God bless him! Rex was starved for affection. (Listen to me, I think these characters are real people … Well, because in a sense they are: they’re images of us). I knew then this movie had more to offer than mere entertainment.
New to the series is Lotso the bear, the self-appointed tyrant leader of all the toys at Sunnyside Daycare. In the course of the movie we learn Lotso’s tragic backstory. Lotso had been Daisy’s most beloved toy. But when she lost him her parents got her another bear just like him. When Lotso found out he had been replaced, he “snapped,” becoming a “monster inside.”
Part of Lotso’s revenge for having been cast off and replaced is that if he can’t be loved, he won’t let anybody else be loved either; if he’s replaceable, then everybody else is too. At one point Lotso confronts Andy’s favorite toy, Woody: “You think you’re special, Cowboy? You’re a piece of plastic. You were made to be thrown away.” When the Ken doll is afraid he’s going to lose Barbie, Lotso says: “She’s a Barbie doll, Ken. There’s a hundred million just like her!” Ken insists: “Not to me there’s not”—and Barbie sighs, knowing that Ken loves her, knowing that Ken sees her as unrepeatable, irreplaceable.
In the story these toys aren’t toys at all. They feel what we feel; they desire what we desire: love. That’s why they’re so relatable. The theme of Toy Story 3 is that being replaced and “thrown away” is the opposite of being loved. We all know that in our hearts, but sometimes we’re acting out our own “revenge” on others for past hurts, like Lotso. When Lotso seems to be having his way and Woody and his pals are doomed for the incinerator, salvation arrives “from above.” In the end, Lotso pays the price for his madness, while love triumphs in the lives of the other toys. Deep stuff for a “kid’s movie.”