With Valentine’s Day just over I began thinking about ‘love’ and our high expectations of relationships, along with the painful reality of heartache through betrayal, infidelity and divorce. I talked with my college age daughter who said, “ Valentine’s Day sucks…it seems like a big set up with impossible expectations”.  Yet at the center of those impossible romantic expectations is something real and truthful, something beautiful. It is the yearning of our beings—to love and be loved. The hope of finding love is the miracle we each hope to discover.

I watch the relationships in this big family I married into—marriages ending, nieces and nephews and my grown children falling in love. I watch friends’ marriages struggling now or finding surprising renewal as the children leave home.

Our eldest daughter and her finance positively light up a room with the radiance of their new love and plans of their future life together.

A family member suffers immeasurably as a marriage ends after decades together.

A sister-in-law lives alone after her husband found a “new” wife.

My ninety year old mother-in-law is lonely after her husband of sixty-four years dies and she struggles in old age to find ways to go on alone.  

Pope Benedict talks about the love between a man and a woman in his first ENCYCLICAL LETTER, DEUS CARITAS EST. Yes—the Pope poignantly talks of the love between God and us and the love between a man and a woman.  What does an old, celibate guy in Rome know about love?  His writings contain surprising wisdom and I recommend a reading, the Pope goes right to the source of love—God’s hope and healing for us, shining the radiance of God’s love into our lives.  

He begins, “In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant. For this reason, I wish in my first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others

“God's love for us is fundamental for our lives, and it raises important questions about who God is and who we are… Let us first of a ll bring to mind the vast semantic range of the word “love”: we speak of love of country, love of one's profession, love between friends, love of work, love between parents and children, love between family members, love of neighbor and love of God. Amid this multiplicity of meanings, however, one in particular stands out: love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness. This would seem to be the very epitome of love; all other kinds of love immediately seem to fade in comparison. So we need to ask: are all these forms of love basically one, so that love, in its many and varied manifestations, is ultimately a single reality, or are we merely using the same word to designate totally different realities?”

Benedict speaks of the difference between “Eros and Agape--That love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings, contrast with an indeterminate, “searching” love, this word expresses the experience of a love which involves a real discovery of the other, moving beyond the selfish character that prevailed earlier. Love now becomes concern and care for the other. No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.”

Having said all this, I am not obtuse to the brokenness and pain of relationships. Yet perhaps it is particularly in the context of our suffering that we come to embrace God’s love for us and commit to our love for Him. Christ came to heal a suffering humanity and it is in these times  that one can experience the epitome of love, the deepest and most healing kind of love, Christ’s sacrificing and suffering love for us in our brokenness.

Some of Pope Benedict’s words on love, whether in the context of romantic love or our individual struggles, when put in the context of God’s love for us, are seen from a new perspective. The veil of loneliness and of feeling unloved is lifted and we can put in our trust in the hands of a God whose love for us endures, whose love embraces our brokenness and is not not conditional on our perfection.
1 John 4: 16 (which Benedict begins his Encyclical with) “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him”.  Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us”. Knowing and believing in this love as tiny as a mustard seed can produ ce the fruits of love. What the world needs now is God’s love. God’s love can transform the most broken, sinful and desperate parts of our lives into astounding beauty.
Click here to read the Pope’s letter on love