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Love is not “license.”
Love is respect and responsibility.
The opening reading and the 71st Psalm today foreshadow the conflict Jesus will confront when he begins His preaching. His own townspeople do not want to hear the truth and so they expel Him from the synagogue with the intention to hurl Him over the edge of the cliff in Nazareth.
The second reading from the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians is about love. A good spiritual exercise is to read the passage in light of what one believes about love. Read it a second time but take the word love out and replace it with your first name. Let the Holy Spirit talk to your heart about “in what aspects of love do I need to grow.”
But what is love? In Greek there are three words for love. “Philia” means brotherly love. “Eros” refers to erotic love. “Agape” refers to a love one has for another which is pure. For my kids, you may have a baby brother or sister. He/she cannot help you with your homework or your chores around the house. They have dirty diapers and cry a lot. But you still love them. That is “agape.”
In our culture music and movies project an image of love with license. “If it feels good, do it.” But the Church teaches love is about respect and responsibility. The first respect is for life in general. All sects of Judaism, the Muslim faith, and sects of Christianity rejected birth control until 1936. The Church of England was the first to accept it, and then all other branches of Christianity followed suit. It became such a point of division during the fifties and sixties that the Pope set up a Pontifical Commission to study the issue. His final decision rested on Natural Law.
For my youth I need to do a “quick lesson” on Natural Law. If you did not have the Ten Commandments or the teachings of the Church about ethics, Natural Law says one can deduce an ethic from the natural purpose of things. The purpose of food is not pleasure or comfort. If it is, then one brings disorder into life. They are called “eating disorders.” The purpose of sex is two fold: first a bond is created; second is the creation of new life, which imitates God’s creative love. If one changes its purpose to pleasure and comfort, Natural Law says you will bring disorder into life. We call these “dysfunctional relationships.”
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Therefore Pope Paul VI taught that if contraception were accepted it would devalue life, people would begin to see it as disposable. It will lead to more divorces therefore more poverty, to abortion, and even euthanasia. As a junior in high school in 1969 I heard my parish priest explain this to us. We laughed to ourselves. We thought contraception was something good to help women and poor families. Surely these things will not happen. His prophecy was true. Divorce tripled, therefore more families dealt with poverty. Abortions went through the ceiling. More men began to see women as objects and vice versa. Relationships became disposable as well as life in general. Euthanasia is legal in some European countries, Australia, and some states in America are pushing for it. The conventual wisdom of the day was the opposite of the insights of Natural Law.
Some parents are thinking, “What does this have to do with my child?” Think about it. Whenever your little girl comes home from school and turns on the television, don’t you know that from Monday through Friday she will see at least one commercial about “the patch?” “It’s clean, easy, and good.” The “patch” merely reinforces the message that life is disposable. Responsibility in relationships is a thing of the past.
Love is about responsibility. The world sends the message that “you have to be hooked up” with someone to be complete, to be happy. The great contrast in the Church is that every chaste priest or woman in Religious Life is an example that one can be chaste and still happy. One can be chaste and still have a life that is meaningful, rewarding, and with purpose. For my teenagers, college students, divorced and single, widows and widowers: the challenge of your Catholic Christian values calls us to be chaste, but still to have fulfilling lives!
Go out into the world and speak the truth. Do not be surprised if they will want to hurl you over the cliff. Remember God’s word to us today in the Psalm and in Jeremiah. “Do not be afraid. I am with you.”