Watering Down Love

To love is to will the good of the other (CCC 1766).  As Christians, we must love people as God loves them, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you . . . This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:9,12).  Sadly, we often water the love of God down to merely preventing pain, instead of helping our loved ones become great saints. 

It is a frequent temptation to love others simply by making them comfortable.  Certainly, we should often love others with small, daily acts which make life easier for those around us.  But we cannot make the comfort of others to be the main focus of our love.  We must be willing to make others uncomfortable due to our love for them. 

In a fallen world, love takes the form of the cross.  Christ said, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).  The expression of God’s total love for us was the cross, “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).  Christ emphatically teaches that we must take up our own cross and follow Him (Matthew 10:38, 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23, 14:27).  If we want to love Christ, we must suffer with him. 

 It is due to sin that suffering is part of life.  Given that we live in a world still full of sin, love will never be pain-free.  Instead, authentic love will require much pain.  Both on our part that we suffer for the sake of the beloved, but also the pain of our beloved.  True love in a fallen world must permit the beloved to suffer.  At times, love demands that our beloved suffers. 

There is no growth in holiness or virtue which is painless.  If we love someone, we want them to grow in virtue and holiness, so we must accept their suffering and not try to prevent it.  Now, we do not want them to suffer for suffering’s sake, but only as a means for spiritual growth.  C.S. Lewis shows this truth in chapter seven of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  There, the nasty boy Eustace has been turned into a dragon and Aslan the lion comes to turn him back into a boy.  Aslan does this by peeling off the dragon skin.  This hurts Eustace terribly, “The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt.”  Yet, Aslan continues to tear the dragon skin off Eustace, accepting the pain he is causing, like Christ tears the sin out of us, accepting the pain it causes us. 

Letting Christ heal our sin hurts tremendously.  Christ had to die to save us from our sin and so we must die with Him (Colossians 1:24; Romans 6:1-11).  Christ does not want to cause us pain, but His love will not let us remain in sin, and so He willingly accepts the fact that we too will have to suffer.  Our love must be similar. 

We must accept that those we love will have to suffer.  We cannot shield them from all suffering.  Sometimes, we must push them towards their suffering like Mary pushes Christ towards His hour at the wedding at Cana (John 2:1-11).  Like Mary at the foot of the cross, we should choose to join others in their suffering, but we cannot stop them from having to undergo it.  Love that refuses to allow the beloved to suffer is not love at all.  Instead, love should push the other towards the good, towards Christ, and thus towards the cross.  Love does not prevent suffering but embraces our beloved’s cross alongside them.