Welcome to a new week, and the last week of posts for the year of 2012, the Chinese symbol of the Dragon. Let's get started! Does anyone think that love has rules or principles that are absolute?True love happens in relationship with others. Even God required an “other” to fulfill His love. He created human beings as love partners, to whom to share the glory of His creation. He needed an object—someone to share with. He needed a relationship in order to experience love fully.
True Love Is Principled
Modern cultural notions have it that love is a spontaneous feeling in one person’s heart toward another. Yet, in fact, ethics weighs prominently that in successful and loving relationships. Examination reveals that ethics and morals enable true love.
Love based on feelings alone can be dangerous.
A man may feel he has fallen in love with another woman and desert his wife and children for her, leaving emotional devastation in his wake. A teacher may feel aromantic attraction toward a young student and wind up psychologically damaging the student for life with sexual approaches.
Love based on feelings alone can be dangerous.
A man may feel he has fallen in love with another woman and desert his wife and children for her, leaving emotional devastation in his wake. A teacher may feel aromantic attraction toward a young student and wind up psychologically damaging the student for life with sexual approaches.
Psychologist M. Scott Peck points out, “Many, many people possessing a feeling of love and even acting in response to that feeling act in all manner of unloving and destructive ways."
In order to
benefit the other, true love adheres to ethical principles.
Based upon principles, a truly loving person will behave benevolently toward a person he or she does not feel benevolent toward in the moment. To be kind to a spouse even when the spouse is being surly means a person believes in kindness, even when the other is not evoking it. It means a person believes in preserving and protecting marriage itself. To help the homeless man on the street means a person believes in treating one’s fellow human beings with compassion, even when that fellow human being is disreputable. To love those who have done a person harm means belief in the ultimate redemption of all, including the reprobate.
Ethics Enable a Life of True Love
Principles help stiffen the will to love the unlovable. They
provide the impetus to enact the prodding of the conscience, which
tells a person to act caringly even at his or her own expense. Mother
Teresa could not have overcome her natural revulsion at the sights
and smells of the diseased and dying in Calcutta had she not believed that the image of Christ was alive in each person. When she saw filthy people being gnawed on by rats in the gutters, it did not
cause her to turn away, leaving them to the trash pile. Instead, she
saw them as Jesus in a “distressing disguise” and asserted their
eternal value as children of God. Adherence to a strong belief system
enables a life of true love.
The necessity for ethical principles in love may be noted in the visceral reactions people have to violations of right and wrong in their relationships. For instance, learning that a spouse has been unfaithful is always an occasion for great anguish and pain. Marital love is bound up with expectations of loyalty, and these expectations are not just culturally conditioned. The emotional pain—the rage and hurt—that adultery causes is testimony enough to the deep affective content of the principle of fidelity in married love.
Ethical expectations accompany every human interaction and relationship—even fleeting ones. A person expects the clerk in the store to be polite and helpful. A driver expects fellow motorists to drive in a safety-conscious way in order to prevent injuries. Passengers on buses expect other passengers to make a minimum of noise, to say “Excuse me” when brushing past, and to move their things out of the way when the seat is needed.
The other-centeredness of these ethical expectations is clearly discernible. In fact, all virtues may be seen to be other-centered in perspective; all vices may be seen to be self-centered. It may be said, therefore, that “living for the sake of others” is the most all-embracing and all-encompassing moral principle.
True Love Is Serving and Sacrificial
True love is active. It involves enacting through willpower the promptings of beliefs and principles. Author and Christian philosopher C. S. Lewis noted that the more one feels without acting, eventually the less one is able to feel. This echoes the Book of James:
If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his own face in a mirror, he sees himself, then goes off and promptly forgets what he looked like.
But the one who peers into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres, and is not a hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, such a one shall be blessedin what he does.
Many faith and ethical traditions emphasize service and self-sacrifice.
The great disciplines require fasting, prayer vigils, caring for the
poor, the sick, the imprisoned, working to bring others into the light
of truth, lengthy periods of silence and contemplation, and the giving
up of worldly goods and pleasures in order to direct the mind toward
God and others. It is as if in order for love to come down from Heaven,
service and sacrifice must create a vacuum on earth.
Sacrifice in service to others creates a pocket in the usual maelstrom of selfishness—an empty space where God may dwell. As Reverend Moon has said, “God is creator and the originator of the two basic principles of service and sacrifice,” and when those principles are put into effect, God’s true love moves in.
The touching story of Shay shows how sacrifice and service to others creates an open place for heavenly love to come down to
earth. Shay was a young, learning-disabled boy. He and his father were walking past a park where some boys were playing baseball.
Shay wanted to play, and his father reluctantly approached one of the boys on the field. The boy said, “Well, we’re losing by six runs, and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team.”
Oddly enough, Shay’s team started to score until they had a chance to win the game. But Shay was up next. Knowing it meant they would lose, Shay’s team still gave him the bat. He didn’t even know how to hold it. Thoughtfully, the opposing pitcher moved forward to throw Shay easy soft pitches. When Shay managed to hit a grounder, the pitcher instead of throwing it to the first baseman, lobbed it in a high arc out into right field. Everyone started yelling,
“Shay, run to first!” Startled, eyes wide, Shay ran to first and past it.
The right fielder then deliberately threw the ball way over the second baseman’s head, and once again, everyone shouted for Shay to run to the next base. The shortstop from the other team even turned him in the right direction. Another wild throw over the third baseman’s head had boys from both teams shouting, “Run home, Shay!” Shay ran home and was cheered by all as the hero who had hit the winning home run.
“That day,” the father said, with tears rolling down his face, “The boys from both teams helped bring a piece of the Divine Plan into this world.” They did so by their willingness to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of a little boy who needed a win more than they did, and who would always remembers the day other created a special space for him to belong.
It is hard to give things up that are in a person’s own self-interest. Yet when a person does so to serve others, a window seems to open in the heart. It is a window through which the warm sunlight, gentle breezes, and the pure oxygen of the love of God may be seen and felt. For a moment, heaven comes to earth, and the whole world breathes a little easier.
Return for Tomorrow's Post: Second Chance at First Love
Return for Tomorrow's Post: Second Chance at First Love
Photos courtesy of : freedigitalphotos.net
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