Is Love A Chore?

 

While praying the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, thoughts came to me about love.

Love as Jesus exampled it, I now know, is a total giving of self.  Jesus lived for the Father, and for us.  He lived out His command to us to love God and love neighbor as He does.  We are to love in imitation of Him, and as with any commandment, or any purely human law for that matter, we are to TRY TO OBEY it.  And we know that isn’t always easy.  But when it is hard, it becomes a matter of the will.  We can will to love that beggar, or to stay within the speed limit when you’re the only one doing so.  Deliberate acts of the will sometimes are against our nature.  We don’t want to do that.  I guess that explains the term willpower.  It takes power, deliberate effort, to love as Jesus defined it, not doing everything for myself, but instead giving of myself.  Love seems to be a chore we were commanded to do, and so we often make excuses so we can still somehow favor ourself in that love. 

I read an article earlier today in the latest issue of Our Sunday Visitor magazine titled: The Answer is a Mystery.  It references a talk given in 2012 by now Pope Leo XIV.  Then Fr. Robert Prevost was addressing a gathering of bishops.

“In order to combat successfully the dominance of the mass media over popular religious and moral imaginations, it is not sufficient for the Church to own its own television media or to sponsor religious films.  The proper mission of the Church is to introduce people to the nature of mystery as an antidote to spectacle, … The Church should resist the temptation to believe that it can compete with mass media by turning the sacred liturgy (the mass) into spectacle. … Evangelization in the modern world must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle into mystery.

Spectacle seeks to overawe us, to entertain and please us, to stimulate emotions. … Mystery, however, is more often found in silent meditation, in careful appreciation and in a deeper understanding based on truth, whether revealed or deeply written on the soul.  Mystery does not aim to please the crowd or the individual.  In mystery, the focus is not on me, but on the other.”

Ah, and that was a pre-thought to these Glorious Mysteries I am now praying.  It has dawned on me that love may indeed be a chore, and against our nature to seek all things for “self”, to seek the spectacular, but love is also a mystery. You can’t be taught love; you can’t see love.  It’s more than a feeling; it is a mystery, until … Praying these Glorious Mysteries it has dawned on me that the events of the rosary decades are indeed mysteries, but by constantly reflecting on these mysteries, they are something I firmly believe.  They became part of me, even though I can’t precisely explain them.

That is how love is.  Total giving of self is a chore, until it becomes part of who you are.  That is what love is, made in His Image.  GOD IS LOVE.

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But, of course, what I wrote isn’t the last word.  As I sat in the chapel, alone with Jesus, I read from Peter Kreeft’s new book titled: The Mystery of Joy.   … Yes, it is a mystery why I had that book with me tonight.  But I read from a chapter titled: The Mystery of Withness:

“Whenever someone we love is dying, we naturally ask what we can do for him.  The best answer, and usually the only answer, is simply to be there with him.  That is the gift of self, of real presence, personal presence.  Only a person can be present. Furniture is not present; it is just there.

How did God reveal His love to us?  By being with us, present to us.  The incarnation fulfilled God’s prophetic name in Isaiah, the name “Immanu-el”, which means: God is with us.”  That is what love seeks: withness, intimacy, closeness, union.  Not pleasure, or even happiness or peace or commitment, but withness.