God’s sweeping acceptance matches our egalitarian aspirations. Moreover, this extensive ecumenical embrace takes root easily in the fertile soil of modern transportation and contemporary telecommunication. A condensed “global village” is the locus par excellence whereby God’s universal love can be witnessed and experienced. Where once justice and mercy have embraced, now differences and diversity are met with inclusivity and acceptance. In this current “woke” culture, such a catholicity is an overdue development considering that the world has suffered far too long from being “so messed up” by political and social conflicts, no doubt some of these were brought about by “religious” enmity.
Love is the key to this adoption by God. We ought to love because failure to do so is testimony to our lack of knowledge of God. As “wokerati” as we want to be, to speak of love as universal is not exactly what St Peter was saying. The caveat in God’s impartiality is that “(A)nybody of any nationality who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to Him”. To love in the way that God has intended has been diminished and distorted by contemporary culture. Stating this is to tread on dangerous grounds now.
What is love and how are we to love?
There are different types of love as suggested by the Greek words used—eros, philia and agape.[1] To understand what it truly is and how to love, take a look at the foundation upon which God based His covenant with man. Throughout history, what is certain is God’s love for mankind. Despite human frailty and failure, the clearest symbol of Divine fidelity is expressed through married love.
However, the Church in her ministers today dares not but nevertheless still has to teach that sexual love is reserved for marriage. Marital love is moral by nature because it defined a union between a man and woman in which God is more than a witness. This covenant is sacramental for it symbolises the ever-faithful love that God has for humanity. Such a teaching NOW finds uneasy ears, or it may just land on hearts coarsened by an understanding of love that has been trivialised by a process “democratisation” in which “love” seems to cave in on itself because it has lost its mooring in God. In this democratised setting, the boundary of love which is moral in nature is now abolished or erased. Now, love can be anything which one fancies. Love has become sentimental.
True love, as exemplified in married love, always reaches out to the other. It is emphatic in its expression, meaning that it involves feelings, but that should not be confused with sentimentality. Love is an act of the will, that is, it is of the rational appetite. Even though the act of loving can be accompanied by warm sentiments, one must never confuse feelings with love. The absence of sentimentality is not an indication that love is absent.
From a confusion of love with sentimentality, we will begin to include every penchant, predilection or proclivity. When God is removed from the equation, is it any wonder why some men must “marry” their machines? Love in which procreation is a function of our participation in God’s creative love, has now taken on a life for itself. By and large, love has become merely a recreational outlet—where pleasure has been substituted for purpose. As such, responsibility has been reduced to self-indulgence.
Further along, love has also been politicised by a godless agenda which seeks to impose itself as the norm wherein every thought that is contrary to its nihilism has to bow down before it. It is impossible to watch a movie these days without coming across some of forms of “love” contrary to what God and religion have intended, being trotted out as “normal”. Consistently cinematic settings are contrived to pit this Catholic teaching on married love against what is now considered acceptable so as to draw the bitter conclusion that the Catholic position is bigoted for even daring to express itself.[2] Children in many ways are now socialised through “language and culture” to admit that every form of love should be acceptable except those forms sanctioned by this unwritten “norm”. Indeed the command to love has been weaponised. What remains unsaid is how foreign aid policies of powerful nations are also hinged on how “modern love” is to be defined.
This is the travail of love and also of Holy Mother Church in a post-truth world. Oxford English Dictionary defines post-truth as “relating or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. Truth has become personal belief and apparently, it must reside within that domain. It is into this world, confused by so many definitions of love, that the Church must continue to proclaim that genuine love must be founded in the truth of who God is and who we are. In fact, according to Benedict XVI, “Truth and love coincide in Christ. To the extent that we draw close to Christ, in our own lives too, truth and love are blended. Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like ‘a clanging cymbal’” (1 Cor 13:1). If anything, a good reminder for us is that Church’s doctrine on married love has not been changed by teaching. Instead, it may have been “changed” by the default silence on the part of the teachers or those entrusted with the truth of the faith.
The truth is that our baptism grafts us into a life of love that must go beyond ourselves. The best expression of a love that is more than the self is observed in the Sacrament of Marriage. It is true that we cannot be good Christians if we do not know how to be good neighbours. To love the other requires that we understand what Jesus had done. What may be trivialised, politicised and weaponised do not change reality. The reality is God so loved the world that He gave His Son so that we might be saved. This is God’s love for us to which we are to respond.
Therefore our model of love must rise above the triviality of the contemporary and myopic sentimentalism. In the current pandemic, what is often brandished is for everyone to heed what is known as the “Common Good”. We are constantly reminded of the need to “modify” our behaviour in the name of public interest. Apart from politicising or weaponising love, this process of “socialising” love also fails to realise that reducing love to common good is basically removing personal responsibility from the act of loving. Love and Common Good are not mutually exclusive but precisely because the nature of love is sacrificial, then even when no one subscribes to the interest of public welfare, the Christian would still love and sacrifice himself. We love not because we have to but because we want to. Most of all, we love and die because of Jesus Christ. There is no such thing as “common martyr”. Instead, there is only personal sacrifice of one life out of love for Christ and His Church. Love is genuinely love when it is sacrificial. We are accustomed to the Eucharist as thanksgiving, but we forget that the Eucharist is also love sacrificed.
The structures we have known, the institutions we have relied upon and the patterns of life we were accustomed to, all these have altered because of this Covid pandemic. What remains is love in truth. In fact, it must remain because whatever may have changed, God has not. Post-modern or not, Truth stands before us as He did before Pilate 2000 years ago. He stood for love and still does for today. Hence, the Letter of John was clear—not our love for God but God’s love for us. The best expression of our thanksgiving and gratitude is to love as God has loved us.
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[1] Benedict XVI in Deus caritas est lists these three categories as love whereas C.S. Lewis has four categories which include “storge” (familial love or fondness).
[2] S.W.A.T. (Series 2017) has an episode in which David “Deacon” Kay, a Catholic is faced with whether or not to judge the “polyamorous” relations of Christina “Chris” Alonso who is a bisexual in a relationship with Kira (Claire Coffee) and Ty (Daniel Lissing). The subtext is that a Catholic is a good one if he or she does not “judge”.
