Before I begin, I would like to set the stage for understanding what inspired me to write this article. Please listen to “Do You Love Me?” from Fiddler on the Roof.
It is very easy to love at a distance. This truth was never more apparent to me than when I returned home from college this summer. I realized the further I was from the day-to-day life of my hometown and family the easier it was to “love” them. However, upon reflection, I realized how my definition of “love” was far more akin to idolatry or infatuation.
It is being removed from a place, relationship, or circumstance that makes it easier to love someone in theory rather than in practice. At a distance, you are removed from all the flaws that are unique to a particular person, place, or thing.
To love is to want the good of another and to long for the fulfillment of the greatest possible potential they can achieve, which is to hope and help them to get to Heaven. In particular, it is much more difficult to love another person when you see them each and every day. The constant demands they make on you when you are “up close and personal” with one another emphasize and accentuate the difficulties of true love. It is much more difficult to simply want what’s best for someone when you have the opportunity to gain something from them or when they have wounded you in some way. The occasions and likelihood of which are much higher when you share more of your time and space with another person.
That is why marriage, family life, and parenthood are considered the ultimate examples of sanctifying love. It is this shared life, this shared love that exposes the faults and vices of the spouses to one another. However, it is the choice to desire one another’s good despite those shortcomings that draw them into the form of human relationship that allows for the greatest growth of true charity and compassion.
In every shared moment with another human being, there is the opportunity to become angry or agitated in the face of these behaviors or to bury resentment in your heart, but that is not the way. It is the choice to deny the initial inclination to react in haste and anger that serves as the foundation for the truest and purest forms of love.
To love despite the blows we have suffered from the hand of another and to hope, pray, and long for the best for them, is real love.
It is that kind of Love that we all desire and pine for; someone to care enough about us to stay and stick it out. That’s the kind of love that Christ calls us to and teaches us as He calls from the Cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk. 23:34). The pain and torture He endured at the hands of those men so long ago were not enough to prevent Him from forgiving, from loving.
The extraordinary nature of this kind of love rests in the fact that it is the Love God offers us each and every day of our lives. No matter the pain we inflict upon Him when we distance ourselves from Him whether, through fear or sin, Christ is always willing to love us up close. WE just have to choose to let Him.
Julia Danehy is a Sophomore in the William F. Connell School of Nursing a hop, skip, and a jump away from her home town of Fort Myers, FL. With the variety of her interests spanning about a million miles long, in her spare time she can be found exploring history, painting, spending time outdoors, whipping up some form of baked good, or reading anything to do with The Theology of the Body/philosophy in general.
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