Christian Love . . . Where we don't become like God

Christian Love . . . Where we don’t become like God?

Written by Dan McDonald 

            If you ever wonder where I get my ideas for writing a blog, I usually just steal them.  I get a lot of them from people on Twitter.  They tweet things, sometimes ideas, platitudes, confessions, stuff that moves and overwhelms them.  Pretty soon I’m thinking about what they were saying and I start to feel a desire to interact.  Hopefully I’m not too out of line doing this.  To be honest, I’ve hardly met any of the people that I’m on Twitter with.  But a lot of times that is how Twitter works.  You meet one person and then another, in that virtual world, a world on one hand where you often really don’t know people who you are dealing, but in another sense you do get to know some people in this way.  Wow stuff sure could be written about that, and oh it has been written about that, probably some PhD work has been done on that.

            Well someone on Twitter posted a tweet about what she was learning about love.  She tweeted:  “I have spent my entire life trying to learn how to give love & come to realize I’ve never learned how to actually receive it.”  Later she tweeted a follow-up saying:  “We are taught in Christian culture that relationships are to be completely selfless & no one ever teaches us to ask for what we need.”

            Her words resonate with me.  For me, I won’t say I’m a master at learning how to escape this sort of dilemma, but for me my Christian life began growing in dimensions I could never have imagined, because C.S. Lewis’ book The Four Loves began to show me that this desire to be selfless in our love was something that was not true to our humanity.

            In fact Lewis describes in his introduction how he imagined when he began to write The Four Loves how he would show that the highest form of love was the selfless “agape” love that alone could truly be called Christian love.  But by the time his book was ready for publication he had come to a very different conclusion.  He had learned that love is multi-dimensional because of our being human.  Especially he had come to appreciate that we as created beings have been created with needs as well as gifts.  We have both needs and gifts and so our loves, to be fully human must involve loving as needy persons as much as loving because we are gifted persons.

            Lewis traces in every chapter he writes how human beings love both as ones with needs and ones with gifts and graces.  To try to deny our needs as part of our love is to deny a vitally human element, our being creatures created with needs.  Consider our love for God.  We were taught to pray for something as mundane as “Give us this day our daily bread.”  We cannot as human beings love God completely selflessly.  Lewis suggests that to try to do so is to fall into the temptation that Adam and Eve succumbed to when they sought to become like God, when they sought to be gods and goddesses in their own persons.  Or as St. John so wonderfully says it “We love him, because he first loved us.”  We respond to his grace as needy creatures yearning to show love to one who has loved us.

            There is actually a danger in imagining that we can love without any sense of our needs.  Why do we want to completely selfless?  Is that what God has called us to, to be persons without needs who can be there for everyone else while we somehow live above this world where we have needs so much that if we go just a few minutes without air we die.  We have needs and God created us with those needs and he is pleased to show us his love in providing for us on a daily basis.  This is what it means that as Christians we belong to the body of Christ who lives in each of us and lives in us as the body of Christ, the Living Church.  We each have our needs and our gifts and we are meant for love, we are meant to love and to be loved.

            It was through this book by C.S. Lewis that I began to learn that to become Christian was to be granted a pathway to becoming truly and fully human.  When this truth about who we are as human beings with needs and gifts sinks in; it sort of makes this Christian life a little bit easier.  I don’t need to feel that I have to be the one who meets everybody’s needs.  Now that doesn’t mean we have a license to be selfish.  Believe me I don’t think the woman who tweeted the words about not knowing how to receive love has any real desire to live selfishly.  But I do think she maybe has a need to realize that when God called her to follow Christ, he called her to feel fully her humanity her needs as well as her gifts.  Perhaps we need to remember that our Lord Jesus got thirsty and asked a Samaritan woman for a drink.  He lived a life where he had needs and he knows that each of us has needs, and he felt his needs enough that when the judgment day comes perhaps the chief way he will determine whose faith was real and whose faith was faulty is who it was who gave him a drink of water, when they gave that drink of water to the least of these.  So here’s the deal.  Christ has called us to follow him, to be gracious and loving, but he also knows you have needs and when someone comes into your life meant to give you something you need give thanks to God and rejoice in thanksgiving for the love you receive both from God and from his very human agent that may actually be performing a deed originated in love.

            Ever since I’ve read The Four Loves I have sort of realized that what Christ came to do when he became fully human on our behalf was to help us learn also how to once more live life in the fullness of our humanity.  When we learn to live life in the fullness of our humanity we shall unwittingly reflect in our own beings the image of God, for this is what humanity has always been about, setting forth the image of God not because we become somehow exactly like God but because God always has meant to show forth his glory and his image in the weakness of human flesh.