43. Sentiment or the commandment of love

The marriage took place in the middle of the summer. Jesus was there with his friends. What could be more natural than a wedding, a love proclaimed in public! And Jesus was there, which was also very natural. That a cloud can begin to gather over the initial rejoicing is alas, even more natural. When the first bloom of romance starts to fade, then there are the regrets... we all know that! The spontaneous attraction no longer suffices and sometimes disappears completely. Must we then say that the couple have fallen out of love? Or ought they to love differently? What is love?

In such darkness and at the heart of this night of the senses, the Gospel light may well shine! Love cannot be reduced to a feeling; rather is it an engagement, a gift of the self. "He who loves, knows God." Love lives by trust and is nourished by faith. At first it is one-sided, and the mutual sharing oneself comes as a deferred surprise, as a resurrection. We must lose ourselves in order to find ourselves; die to self so as to be reborn into a transforming relationship, the same yet different!

Broad and treacherous is the highway, on which travel those who love for a day, and change partners as often as superficial sentiments no longer sustain the relationship; narrow is the road of faithful and absolute love, the love lived by Jesus. "There is no greater love than to give one's life for those whom we love." Love then cannot be reduced to mere sentiment: "I did love you, and that was good. I don't love you any more. That's the way it is!" "I love cherries and I spit out the stones!" Love is not just a feeling, as we said. It is not just that delicious thrill, irrepressible and at the same time terribly fleeting: love in the Gospel is a commandment. "Love one another as I have loved you!" Love's appeal is not simply to the affections, but also to the intelligence and to the will. The sacrament of marriage, in strict theological terms, is the reciprocal agreement of the spouses, the mutual assent of two wills, the exchange of promises.

The love of a man and a woman becomes a sacrament when it is lived inside the faith. It is not simply a liturgical affair. For over a thousand years, Christians married in the context of a family feast just like all the others, with exchange of vows, without its being a specifically religious ceremony. It was only towards the sixteenth century that it was decided to register marriages, and this contributed progressively to the popularising of the celebration.

The love between two Christians is not a different kind of love. It is the same very natural love, though potentially rich with the supernatural. They were two, they are now one, in the image and creative resemblance of the living God who is communion, unity in diversity, One and Three: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is the same very natural love, but Christ's Revelation opens it up, tears it apart, crucifies it on infinite horizons, so that it may live on his limitless pardon and on his boundless solidarity with the deprived.

Christ's Revelation alters one's outlook, turns around what was hitherto obvious, reveals an unsuspected happiness, one that is pure, gentle, peaceful, full of compassion for human misery, and driven by the urge to see a world united in love. Christ's Revelation causes us to desire solidarity with the whole of history, with all the living, both past and present. "I love you, you will not die!"

Love makes one blind, they say? Passion perhaps, but authentic love causes one in particular, to see what has not yet come about, except in promise. At present we see in a confused manner, but then, all will be clear! We shall see clearly, face to face... and all that is imperfect will disappear!

When an engaged couple comes to the Church to seal their love, by grafting their mutual commitment on to the Covenant of the living God, they can receive a sap so rich, coming from such depths and mounting so high, that it nourishes fruits in abundance and at every season. God has but one Word, His Only Son, and he gives him to us totally and without reserve. We despised him, disfigured him, muzzled him, buried him, without ever managing to silence or to discourage him. The Church is nothing else but that section of humanity, which replies "yes" to the mad gesture of God.

She assembles together all those who risk believing, who give themselves unequivocally, relying - as a small child entrusts itself to its fathers' outstretched arms, on Gods' fidelity in Jesus Christ. When a couple takes the risk of engaging themselves in this spirit, sharing with the other Christians around them, and confiding themselves to their prayer, they then become a sign of the Covenant. Because their love has reached this point, Christians can in their turn risk recognising it as the mystery which unites them and constitutes them as Church. Having attained, in their gift of one to the other, a dynamic stability, and as it were a point of no return, breaking up becomes impossible. It would be human and spiritual suicide. It would appear to those around them as a terribly destructive scandal, demonstrating "a contrario" that the quality of such love reaches the irreversible, i.e. that of sacrament, the tangible sign of the radical love of the living God.

To say of a human love that it has become a sacrament, may however lack some nuances. The affirmation "all or nothing" furnishes sociological and legal viewpoints, but it omits the time dimension: both as to duration and the steps necessary for maturation. Just as Jesus became what he was, just as each one of us becomes progressively more truly christian, in the same way, love is called upon to become each day more sacramental.

Jesus compares the Kingdom of heaven to a tiny seed, which slowly develops until it becomes a great tree. Love, at first hesitant, is thus called upon to develop and strengthen itself, in order to receive not only the birds, but also children, friends, and the poor, whom it welcomes in simplicity. The tiny seed is promise of the great tree, and the love of two young persons, fragile though it may be, already carries within itself the ambition of God's wonderful plan.

It is comforting then to tap into Biblical memory. The dramatic moments are always times of the most difficult crises. The Egyptian genocide, the thirst in the desert, the exile and death of the prophets, all culminate and are recapitulated in the Pasch of Jesus. The least one can say is that the couple in love who are part of the people and their God, is a couple whose relationship leaves much to be desired. We constantly hear of marriages that are strained and in situations of conflict. Even in the Canticle of Canticles, the manner in which the Bridegroom searches for the Beloved is not a smooth one. Communication is difficult and constantly pointless. The Word has difficulty in making itself heard in the mêlée of constant misinterpretations about what constitutes real power and true happiness. From the beginning of the Covenant, everything appeared to be destroyed. The unfaithful people merited death, but they were to cross the desert. In the end, love, manifested in the face of a person, spoke his Name and signed it with his naked body in the form of a cross. It is there in fact that everything is to begin, for Jesus has risen, love has rebounded in pardon, and an eternal alliance has been sealed. Christians, the reminder of the cross forces us to become cruelly lucid, but love has triumphed and our hope is well founded. With this certainty, the commitment to total love becomes the only reasonable madness.

We proceed from the Deluge to the reappearance of land, from darkness to light and from division to reconciliation. Love, at first one-sided and denied, ends in reciprocal sharing. This however does not happen until after the crisis which gave rise to the conscience examination, and after the word had reinvented a future,

To love each other in the form of a sacrament, is freely to choose that manner of loving. To inscribe one's covenant in God's Covenant; to plunge into it, steep the relationship in it - as one would temper steel, baptise the union in the passionate love story of God's marriage with humanity!

This tremendous adventure traverses the centuries, and history finds in it its most intimate raison d'être, its deepest meaning. For us, the same issues are there in symbol and in a reduced form in the lives of the couple.