If the popularity of boybands were to be a rule of measure, then we must be experts at loving. Yet, the world seems racked by rejection, hatred and violence. To love has become more complicated because Western civilisation has entered the era of post-truth. We are influenced by this development and whether we like it or not, we need to come to terms with it.
Apart from the philosophical and theological complications associated with the phenomenon of post-truth, another difficulty which Christians encounter is “unfair” expectation. It is commonly accepted that all religions teach their adherents to do good. “Sadly”, the Church, founded on the theological virtue of charity finds herself subject to the litmus test of love exemplified by the life-giving self-sacrifice of Jesus. It is a higher moral standard, no doubt. But the love of Christ is regularly used against Christians in the oft-repeated grievance “Are you not supposed to be loving?” which quite effectively pull the rug from under a Christian’s feet. This expectant derision of Christianity’s failure possibly masks a misconception of what love truly is.
Love is much higher a standard than we are used to. Genuine love frequently runs counter to our feelings. It is not easy to love a person for whom one has no sympathy which makes love a commitment of the will and not an expression of our sentiment. In the early history of the Church, a phrase stands out when it came to describing Christians. “See how they love one another” documented how struck pagans were by the witness of Christian love. It extended beyond the family and friends to one’s enemies.
In fact, the descriptions from the Acts of the Apostles direct our attention to the perceived “Golden Age” of the primitive Christian communities. Yet we should not be misled by this lofty suggestion of the initial utopia of Christianity. These halcyon days of harmony cannot be further from the reality of Paul and Barnabas’ falling out with each other. Or later when the split took place between those who were for Paul and those who sided with Apollos.
This shows us that what happened then was no more than what is happening now. Firstly, the failure of love that resulted in fragmented Pauline communities stems from an effect of Original Sin. Fallible man makes fallible mistakes. If Lucifer, a pure spirit can rebel against God, how much more, we who are embodied spirits? We are weighed heavily by a concupiscence which works against God’s grace. Secondly, the era of post-truth places an added challenge to the commandment to love because we are expected to conflate love with acceptance and tolerance. It is an idea of love that springs from a culture adrift aimlessly in the sea of moral relativism; present philosophical underpinnings are not moored to objective standards. Instead, truth is reduced to whichever is the prevailing narrative accepted or imposed. To paraphrase St Paul in Eph 4:14 we are “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”.
The challenge is that this attitude of oscillating between one extreme and another seems to be the only acceptable position for a Christian to take if one were to survive this modern scourge that truth and its objectivity is unattainable. In this daunting landscape, the Christian is to exercise his charity. How do we love when truth is reduced to positions that shout the loudest? How to love when truth is defined by who has the power to impose the accepted narrative? Think of misinformation.
This stems from being trapped in echo chambers that are comfortable zones of self-acceptance and self-validation where we feel secure and safe. Many exchanges we have merely amplify and reinforce our accepted belief. From the security of our self-righteousness, we can “judge” those who are do not echo our sentiments. Internet trolling is just a mild version. Mostly, the judgements can be harsher and even violent. Just to illustrate: the present debate about abortion. It is such a divisive topic and for those who hold a vision that life is sacred from the moment of conception, the command to love is perilous.
How does love navigate itself in a fractured and fragmented world in which the non-acceptance of the approved narrative will only invite shaming, silencing and shunning?
To love is also to speak that love in truth. Admittedly, this is really not easy in a very noisy environment filled with so many ideologies. But love demands it. For love to be love, it demands that we stand with truth. For the Christian, thankfully, truth is not just a set of cold hard facts. Truth is Jesus Christ. He is our goal and standard.
He is our model of speaking and living truthfully even there is exerted pressure to “tailor” that “truth” to fit the conditions of life. In other words, we are expected make Jesus fit our stories. Jesus is love, right? That being so, it means He must love us no matter what. It is true that God loves us no matter what but this unconditional love is not a truth in which “what” has no objectivity to it. To wit an example, a simple “what”, that is, a limit, a standard or an objectivity is “not to kill” proving that “God loving us no matter what” is not indefinite or ambiguous.
A probable reason for lukewarm or ambiguous love is not because we are afraid to love. The opposite of love is not hatred but rivalry. In heaven, Lucifer considered himself to be a rival of God. It was not the hatred of God but jealousy that drove Lucifer to subvert and undermine God’s plans. Satan is still at it. Likewise, in many of our own quarrels within ecclesiastical settings, they are not marked by “hatred” but by insecure rivalry that sabotages each other. Imagine how effective our evangelisation could have been if we were not working against each other?
How then do we love when there is deep-seated fear arising from insecurity?
The Eucharist is our answer. At the beginning, the link was made between the vocation of priesthood and the Eucharist. It turns out that there is more to the Eucharist. It is also a vocation of love. Just before Jesus ascended Calvary, He celebrated the sacrifice of love with His Apostles. Even as He broke the bread and blessed the chalice, there amongst His closest collaborators, sat a traitor, a denier and a doubter. If you sit here with jealousy, anger, hatred and feeling unworthy, then you are in good company. The meal of love is not a meal of the perfect but a preparation for the extraordinary sacrifice to take place at Calvary. Broken and ineffective, we draw strength from this Sacrament of Love so that little by little as we climb Calvary, our love may be purified and perfected so that at the summit, we would have nothing to weigh us down but only love for God and for one another [1].
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[1] Finally, to tie in with last week’s theme, it was mentioned that every Christian is a vocation of friendship with the Lord, then authentic love must draw its inspiration from its source, the Eucharist. A robust friendship with Christ through the Eucharist will make our love more divine. In a world which struggles to love the unlovable, then divine love is in the extraordinary which expresses itself most powerfully in suffering. It may be humanly impossible to love especially our enemies, those who do not share our conviction and those who hate us. But Christ’s love for His Father gave Him the strength to forgive those who had sinned against Him and to love until the last drop of His Blood.
