Canon Gerry Conroy
I sometimes think that we are living in a time when people are so obsessed by love that they have actually become blind to it. There is a common belief that, as the old Beatles song has it, ‘all you need is love’; unfortunately my experience tells me that is not true.
Love needs supported by such things as integrity and honesty and perseverance and even that seemingly old-fashioned virtue chastity. Without these other often overlooked virtues, love is in danger of succumbing, like everything else, to the corruption with which this world seems to taint everything good.
Love has become too romanticised to survive the harsh reality of this world; that is why it becomes so lost in the confusion of modern life and ends up ruined by betrayal and lust and selfishness. It can’t survive by itself, it needs the support of other virtues which we all recognise are present in a love that lasts and enriches the lives of people but which modern society wants to silence in the name of freedom and autonomy.
Which brings me nicely to another way that modern society has corrupted love. This insistence we meet everywhere about the importance of freedom.
One of the great things about love for me is the freedom it brings into people’s lives. I have seen people hurt by the worst that life can do to them, blossom when they have experienced a real and true love that has set them free from the horrors they had experienced.
But our society is so obsessed with a freedom that it has misunderstood as autonomy that it is in danger of destroying love and turning it instead into another expression of selfishness. The result is such things as polyamory, free love, betrayal, an inability to commit to another person in a loving relationship, an inability to persevere in relationships because they feel their autonomy of self-expression is being stifled.
I suspect that for most people the trouble with what Christ has to say about love is that it seems to be completely unrelated to how they view life, or how they experience living in this world that has romanticised love to the point that it has little to do with life as it really is.
What Christ has to say about love is so opposed to their idea of freedom that it makes little sense to them.
If someone hits us, the natural impulse is to strike back, if someone steals from us, we want justice – sometimes a bit more than that.
To find someone who has the freedom to show kindness and thoughtfulness to some stranger who hurts them is rare.
We can all struggle at times to have the freedom to show such generosity in our dealings even to those whom we love. The compassion that Jesus is asking of us, doesn’t seem to come naturally to us; the love he is speaking of is no longer even something we might classify under the heading of love, not immediately anyway until we start to look at the mess in which love finds itself in our world and when we consider also the love that we cherish in our own lives and what that is like.
The law of love that Christ puts before us is not good, is not true, because God commanded it; rather, God commands it because it is good, because it is true. When we use our free will to live our lives with this truth, we will find authentic freedom and we will know the truth of ourselves.
In considering the love we cherish, we find a love that isn’t isolated from integrity and honour and chastity.
St Paul said, we have been modelled on the heavenly man, on Christ. The love Christ shows is the love that brings us freedom.
We live in a society where people are preoccupied with their own inner psychological state, always trying to achieve happiness but lack any sense of a transcendent. The love Christ is speaking of takes us out beyond ourselves to serve God and others; that is where we will find true love and real freedom.