I figured since February is in its last stretch, I wanted to reflect a little on love. I feel that I have spent most of my lifetime searching for, contemplating, and doing my best to imitate perfect love. I have reached the conclusion that true love is characterized by two things, deepness and wideness. I think that I should share a tiny bit of my testimony first before diving deeper.
I have grown up in a very caring and supportive household. My parents both showed us how to begin our way to Christ from as young as I can remember. The books we used to learn how to read were religious books, the summer camps that we attended were various vacation bible school camps, and we were taught to look for “God sightings” every day. We would pray in the car on the way to school, and the prayer that we said was a morning offering to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Fast forward to college, and I notice how my life has been in imitation of the Sacred Heart. I grew to understand through my own experiences how the Sacred Heart shows us how love, suffering, and joy are all related. There are three primary images in the Sacred Heart: the heart itself to symbolize love, the crown of thorns to symbolize suffering, and the fire to symbolize joy. My friend summed up this relationship when he said, “True love has thorns, yet even the thorns are engulfed in flames.” Father Mike Schmitz sums up the relationship in a second way when he says, “We suffer for what it is that we love,” which can be rephrased as: the joy of suffering is love. Let me expand on both of these.
“True love has thorns, yet even the thorns are engulfed in flames.”
The crown of thorns is the symbol of Jesus’s death. When you truly love someone, you die to yourself. This is so hard because it means that our love has to become pure gift. We have not died to ourselves if we expect something in return for our love or our loving actions. On a small scale, this looks like doing the dishes for your family as an act of kindness without later expecting someone else to do the dishes next time because you did them this time. On a little bit bigger scale, this looks like being quick to ask for forgiveness for what you do wrong when a conflict arises instead of expecting someone else to admit to their mistakes against you. To die to yourself also means being unafraid to feel deeply for another. The flames arise when you experience the joy that comes with this sort of love that suffers. The joy of missing someone because you hope for the day when you will see them again. The joy of feeling physical pain when your friend is going through a trial because it is through that pain that you are together. The joy of holding your sister as she cries, knowing that the tears will bring you to more frequent intercessory prayer for her well-being.
The joy of suffering is love.
In the story of Genesis, after God hears that Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, we have a part of the story that is commonly referred to as the fall. Here, God gives Adam and Eve a sort of punishment followed by banishing them from the garden. God can seem like a cruel Father for doing this, but we know that God is all good, so if God truly were cruel, it would contradict who He is. So what is really going on? First, Adam and Eve broke their loving relationship. We see this when Eve invites Adam into sin with her by giving him an apple, then again when Adam is questioned by God and blames the event on Eve. If Adam and Eve were to stay in Eden, a place of perfect love, now with imperfect love for each other, they would be miserable. They would be unable to enjoy all that was in Eden and unable to receive a relationship with God full of lightness, freedom, and life. So out of His love for them, God had Adam and Eve leave Eden, but not without a way back. The way back came in the punishments: the suffering that Adam and Eve would both have to go through in order to relearn how to love each other.
We all suffer. We are also all faced with the choice of what we will suffer for. Father Mike Schmitz says that what we choose to suffer for will be what we grow in love for. If someone suffers without making it an offering, they are not able to recognize the fruits of their suffering. They despair because they see suffering as an end with no way out, and they claim to be powerless to it. But we are not powerless to suffering. Because we are made in God’s image and likeness, we are able to create real change–just as our Creator can change everything–through prayer. Any person can offer up their suffering in prayer. You can offer it to be closer to Jesus so that He can embrace you as He hangs on the cross. You can offer it to a friend so that they may receive special graces. You can even offer it for yourself for your own virtue. Whatever relationship you offer your suffering for will be purified, and your love for that person will go deeper.
Not only is pure, genuine love deep as the cut of suffering allows for, but it is also wide. I met many people in high school in college who showed me what this wide sort of love looks like, but I would like to mention one friend in particular. She would characterize herself as a major introvert, but that didn’t stop her from having a great desire to love all of the people that she encountered. She would hold the door for people that looked like they were carrying a lot, engage in conversation with the cafeteria staff if they seemed like they wanted to talk, walk with new friends to their classes if she was too busy to set up times to meet with them otherwise, and sit with a stranger that was sitting alone in the student center simply because they looked like they could use some company. I admire her and am working on loving with a wide love like this that includes but does not stop with my friends and those whom I know. Yes, this sort of love can seem exhausting, but I have found that the emptier we are from giving our limited amount of human love away, the more space God has to fill in our heart with His unlimited divine love. To have a heart that is no longer ours but has been so overtaken with God’s heart that it quite literally becomes the Sacred Heart–that is true love.
