NO ONE FALLS IN LOVE by Father Charles Van Winkle, CSC
As at his conception, at his humble birth we soon will again commemorate, Jesus reminds us that no one falls in love. “You know the graciousness of our Lord Jesus Christ–how being rich, he became poor for your sake, that by his poverty you might become rich.” (2 Cor 8:9).
In a recent commercial a lady says, “I want to fall in love again.” Impossible. Notwithstanding that billions of times over the centuries people have eagerly talked about falling in love, no one has ever fallen in love. Rather, we readily fall into infatuation, into liking, into good feeling toward another, but we have to climb into a love relationship.
Have you ever wondered why we are commanded to love? Jesus is God and “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8b). The Incarnate Word was nailed to and raised up on a cross. And Jesus had exclaimed, “There is no greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15:13). And so we refer to the Sacrifice of the Mass.
Sacrifice is the nature of love, and because we have a fallen human nature, we don’t feel like loving. Therefore it is redundant to speak of “tough love.” In the Song of Songs we read, “Deep waters cannot quench love, nor floods sweep it away. Were one to offer all he owns to purchase love, he would be roundly mocked” (8:7).
Because sacrifice is the nature of love, in order to love we must make an act of the will to override the pessimism of the intellect and the inclination of the wayward feelings. If Jesus had succumbed to his feelings, we would not be redeemed.
Again, we must make the act of the will to love one another. For example, several years ago during a retreat day for high school seniors at Holy Cross School in New Orleans, one of the participants startled his classmates by sharing the following: “I broke up with my girl friend six weeks ago. You want to know why? Because I love her. Yeah, we got ourselves into a situation where I wasn’t helping her to become a better person, and she wasn’t helping me to become a better person. And although I still have this strong liking, this strong feeling for her, because I love her, I had to accept the strength of Jesus to back off.” One could hear a pin drop in that assembly.
And so the young man has beautifully illustrated how we know if we are in a love relationship: When we are determined to respect one another as children of God made to his image and likeness; when we are willing to sacrifice, to go forward or back off when we don’t feel like it that we may become more whole, holy, happy, human, free, mature, in control, lovers, Christlike, who we are called to be, we truly love one another.
Falling into infatuation, into liking, into good feeling regarding the other is the easy aspect of a new relationship. Climbing into love–making the act of the will to sacrifice in time of the “worse, sickness, poorer, until death”–is the challenge.
To paraphrase an episode from Shanendoah: “I want to marry your daughhter because I love her,” the young man said to her father. “Son, I don’t want to know if you love my daughter; I want to know if you like her, because I did not begin to love my wife until about two years after we were married. Yes, we liked one another, had a good feeling for one another; otherwise we would never have gotten married. But it wasn’t until I had to go out into the field and work when I didn’t feel like it, that I began to understand the true meaning and nature of love.”
Unfortunately, today the word love is commonly used for like and lust, resulting in free-fall relationships without parachutes.
But with our fallen human nature, how are we able to make the act of the will to live the GOD, Good Orderly Direction, in relating to others when tempted to the contrary by our wayward feelings? The simple means to follow through, to experience “His commandments are not burdensome” (1 Jn 5:3b), is briefly, clearly explained and readily understood in the English-Spanish booklet, “Far Greater than a Secret: The Faith-Love Principle.”
Finally, an axiom is a statement generally accepted as being true. Consider this expression that has masqueraded as an axiom for centuries but is totally false: “All who love are blind.” On the contrary, since “All love comes from God, and we are able to love because God has first loved us” (1 Jn 4:7a,19), those who love have the vision of God to the degree they are open in faith to the Source of all love. Those who simply like are blind. Again, it is living the Faith-Love Principle that increasingly enables us to see clearly.
Order the booklet today to augment your vision. (Send $2–$1 for the booklet and $1 for first-class mailing–to Faith-Love Principle, P.O. Box 40533, Austin, TX 78704. A 25% discount of the total cost applies to orders of six copies or more.)