Lesson In Love

A few days ago, I had my first lesson in love.

The greatest kind of love, that is – the kind of love called agape, charity. Not the alms-giving kind, but a kind of selfless love that is more than a feeling, directed not towards the abstraction of humanity but at a concrete individual, the willing of another’s good, love for love’s sake. Peter Kreeft wrote an excellent essay on this kind of love; C.S. Lewis spoke about it at great length; Jesus Christ demonstrated exactly how it worked.

Kreeft says: “(S)omehow in agape you give yourself away, not just your time or work or possessions or even your body. You put yourself in your own hands and hand it over to another. And when you do this unthinkable thing, another unthinkable thing happens: you find yourself in losing yourself. You begin to be when you give yourself away. You find that a new and more real self has somehow been given to you. When you are a donor you mysteriously find yourself a recipient - of the very gift you gave away.”

I thought I was pretty well on the way to learning this kind of love; after all, two years’ into conversion should count for something. And then I met someone who radiated agape, and I realized that I hadn’t even enrolled for the course.

There’s something about someone who has given up his all for Jesus; who has trusted so completely and so unconditionally in His direction; who preaches what love is all about without even having to say a word. This person’s self is lost completely, totally given away in the love of God as made real by loving those He asked us to love, and replaced by a new self – a new self that so very closely resembles the One to whom that surrender was made.

I’ve often wondered what it was to walk in the company of Jesus. In my meditations, I like to talk to Saint Peter and ask that big, brash, uneducated buffoon of a fisherman how it was to be loved and forgiven by the Master. And the Saint formerly known as Simon often helps me to see that, despite his weaknesses and impetuosity, his passive-aggressiveness and cowardice, his faithlessness and betrayal, the Lord always always took all of him, even in his grizzled, smelling-of-fish, loudly-sobbing state of disheveledness, into the tightest of bear hugs.

I think that those who have walked in the company of the Holy Father, or of Mother Teresa - as these holy ones of God kissed the little children, blessed the infirm, comforted the dying and the diseased, and embraced their enemies - have known this kind of experience. I think that those who have walked with any of the Missionaries of Charity or Brothers of the Poor as they went about their work have known it as well. I walked one morning with one humble but joyful man who has given up all to the Master and in return received that perfect kind of love to give away, and on that morning I knew what it was to walk with Christ. Somehow all in his path knew that this person was someone who loved them in a special way, because a beautiful thing about agape – the agape of Jesus, passed on to Peter, and to John Paul II, Teresa of Calcutta, and numerous religious and lay followers of Christ over the centuries who have given up all to receive All – is that it is an interior light that shines so brightly from within that the person who has it in his or her heart physically radiates it. And those upon whom the brightness and warmth of that light shines cannot help but be drawn to its glow…some dare to come so close as to be infected and possessed by it. I walked with Jesus as He shone through this new friend of mine that morning, and I was drawn into that light. I can only pray for the grace to radiate Christ in the same way, because I know I have a long way to go after this first lesson in love!

Dear Jesus, help us to spread Your fragrance everywhere we go. Flood our souls with Your spirit and life. Penetrate and possess our whole being so utterly that our lives may only be a radiance of Yours. Shine through us, and be so in us that every soul we come in contact with may feel Your presence in our souls. Let them look up and see no longer us, but only Jesus! Stay with us, and then we shall begin to shine as You shine; so to shine as to be a light to others. The light, O Jesus, will be all from You, none of it will be ours; it will be You shining on others through us. Let us thus praise You in the way you love best: by shining on others through us. Let us preach You without preaching, not by words but by our example, by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do, the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear to You. Amen.
- Cardinal John Henry Newman
(The Missionaries of Charity pray this prayer every day after Mass, as did Blessed Teresa of Calcutta)