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"Love is wanting and doing what is best for the other person at all

times"

If we start from the standard of perfection that Our Lord gave us:

“Greater Love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends”

We realize that most of us will not be called to the sacrifice of red martyrdom.
Still the fact remains that we are called to this greater sacrificial love. This
calls us to lay down our lives for one another on a
daily basis. We are called to become LIVING
SACRIFICES! Some term this as white martyrdom
which can certainly be much more difficult to do. I do
not doubt that the vast majority of men would risk
their lives defending their home and family from and
intruder, but it may be a more daunting task to love
your wife for a sharp retort or unkind word spoken to
you, or your teenager for making some poor choices,
or a co-workers gossip.

The Greek word for this type of love is agape. This


word is most often used in the New Testament for
love.

In breakng this down carefully we can further understand the definition.

"Love is wanting and doing what is best for the other person at all
times"

If we stopped at the wanting and do not include the “doing” we can find
ourselves in a situation described in the book of James where he states
"Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you
says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing
about his physical needs, what good is it? " if we then do nothing are we truly
loving this person? This reduces love to a mere wish.

Or if we remove the “wanting” and only say "Love is doing what is best..."
then we run the risk of substituting what God wants for this person with what
we think is best. The "wanting" always inferrs that we want what is what God
wants. We may also have the wrong motivation for our actions like the
Pharisees whom Jesus describes as whitewashed tombs "Woe to you,
teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed
tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead
men's bones and everything unclean." Perhaps the Pharisees were unaware
of their self-deception which is why you and I must always ask ourselves "Am
I doing your will here, Lord"

Inserting “for the other person” we always keep in mind our Lord’s command
“to love one another as I have loved you” and
thus take the focus from ourselves and the
desire to have our needs met first. The
ultimate goal of this "wanting and doing for the
other person" is to help the other person get to
heaven to be in eternal union with God. This is
the highest and greatest good.

The final part “at all times” actually brings us


back to the first word Love. When does Love stop "wanting and doing what is
best for the other person"? When does God stop lavishing His Divine
Love/Grace upon us? The answer is never, and for us this means “at all
times” we are called to love one another as God has loved us. As you already
may have surmised this is not a one-time event in our lives and without a
doubt we must always be striving to grow in our ability to love as Jesus
loves, in Greeek this type of Love God has for us is called Agape. However,
there are times when we may meet someone who ignites our passion. This
type of love is referred to in Greek as eros.

Now the world’s definition of eros is defined too often as merely intercourse
and because of this I think many of us who grew up as Catholic/Christian have
a negative connotation of eros as something bad or evil. My Catholic
educational experience did little to dispel this misconception and in fact
reinforced the idea of “sex is bad”. When I started giving chastity talks to high
school age teens there were many great reasons to avoid sex outside of
marriage. I found it especially easy to attack the “bottom feeder” guys who
took advantage of girls, even if it was not their original intention. However
when it came to the teens (or adults for that matter) that were in a “long term”
relationship with real and intense human emotions involved there were no
great reasons to wait only very good ones. Most of my research into what the
Church said as well as some highly successful chastity speakers either gave
some ethereal teaching that could not be put into human language, relied on
some great statistics which addressed the intellect but did not speak to the
human heart, or instructed us avoid these kind of relationships until you are 25
and “ready” to enter into marriage. As I said these are all good approaches
that have been effective for some, but
do not speak to the human heart where
these strong emotional passions start.
Pope John Paul II’s thorough catechesis
on Theology of the Body and followed
up by Pope Benedict’s first encyclical
Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) look at
the world’s definition of eros and
condemn it outright as heresy. That is
exactly what is it is and thank God for
their courage to tackle this issue. The
Church has always affirmed the beauty
of our human sexuality as “very good”, even holy, and the way the world
screams hysterically about how the Church and Christianity condemns sex
shows how the world hates the followers of Christ. Unfortunately, the worlds
neurotic screeching has infiltrated the Church (especially since the sexual
revolution, which I refer to not as a revolution, but as the bloodiest civil war in
human history), and not until now has the Church responded boldly and
definitively. Neither of the two popes stops at just condemning this heresy, but
gives us real concrete and substantial teaching that satisfies the human heart
and energizes us to engage the culture without fear.

Agape and Eros Meet

As I have stated above there are many types of love, but the highest are
agape and eros. The traditional way of looking at these is that agape is the
unconditional love of God for us. He loved us first though we did not merit His
Love and it is a purely gratuitous gift from God. This gift was so powerful and
His Love so complete that He made us in His image and likeness. This initial
creation of humanity in the image and likeness of God is referred to in
Theology of the Body as Original Solitude.

The traditional way of looking at eros is the erotic unitive love between a man
and a woman. If we continue to hold onto the
idea that we are made in His image and
likeness and remember that He is Trinitarian
union or communion of persons we can see
also that it is in this marital union that we most
image the Godhead...let me say this again it is precisely in the unity of
husband and wife in the marital embrace that we most image God. We can
see that if we return to Jesus’ words about “in the beginning…” we begin to
get a glimpse of human love in the divine plan. We see at once the agape
self-sacrificial love of Adam and Eve as well as the eros. In giving up his rib
Adam was put into was ekstasis in Greek, which can be translated as ecstasy.
At the very moment that Adam’s sacrificed a rib he was in ecstasy and
immediately following this Adam exclaims “This one at last is bone of my
bones and flesh of my flesh…and the two of them become one” In this we see
the self sacrifice of Adam’s rib, his “wanting and doing what is best for the
other” or agape, and the coming together of husband and wife, eros. Adam
and Eve demonstrated perfect unity between agape and eros as human
beings. Pope Johm Paul II referrs to this as Original Unity. It was not until the
fall when, confronted with Satan, that Adam did not do what was best for his
bride and stand between Eve and Satan. He chose not to enter into battle with
the Evil one, and sacrifice himself. It was only then that this unity between
agape and eros was disrupted. It was not until Christ came and followed
through with the battle with Satan that the possibility of this unity was restored.

How do we restore that which has been lost? Once again I point us back to
the beginning. When God initially created mankind, man’s relationship with
God was abundantly clear. Adam was in right relationship with God. He was
well aware that God had created him and that all things came from Him. So
Adam in his solitude had a relationship with God. When Eve came from the
side of Adam and thus was created with equal dignity and with the same
fullness of humanity as Adam, she too was in right relationship with God. Thus
when Adam and Eve came together each of them was in relationship with
God and each of them brought that relationship into the marriage. So Adam
and Eve were in right relationship with God as a couple. Each of us as
husbands and wives needs to have a relationship with Christ and then put our
relationship with each other under the lordship of Christ. This is even more
true and important today than at the time of the original couple, because even
though we have the abundant Grace Christ merited for us by His sacrifice we
have to work a lot harder at our relationship with Him.

It is not a coincidence that Jesus' first public miracle occurred at the wedding
at Cana. In other words the first public sign of man's broken relationship with
God was the disunity of the marriage of Adam and Eve and the first public
sign of God's desire to restore marriage and man's relationship with God is a
miracle at a wedding! Theologians note that the wine represents the Love and
Grace of God and Jesus changed between 120-180 gallons of water into
wine, which was way more than could be consumed at the wedding. God
knew we NEEDED the additional help and this signifies a super abundance of
Grace that is poured into a marriage that seeks the Love of God as its source.
It is here we can see that the power and shadow of the Cross extends over all
time from the very beginning with Adam and Eve and God's promise to send a
redeemer to each and every marriage today.

“Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church giving himself up for
her…” It is here that we see the first part of the formula for how we are to let
eros be transformed by agape. Husbands sacrifice yourselves on behalf of
your wife. Rightly understood this means that in humility the husband is to
pray, fast, offer up the daily challenges, pains, mortifications, and if necessary
his very life to God for the sanctification of his wife and the marriage. For
wives this initially means you are to accept and receive your husband’s
sacrifice on your behalf and pray that he will have the strength, courage, and
perseverance to keep up his sacrificial offering for YOU and return to him the
love he has shown for you. This is one of the reasons I love speaking to men
about how they are to be as husbands. I have found that men are so lost as to
how to go about bringing sanctity into their marriages. It has been my
observation that when men challenge men to be what they have been called
to be they respond, one of the problems is that there are far too few men out
there challenging men to be men of God and to take up the battle for their
wives. Just as Satan targeted Eve for his initial attack so too are our wives the
initial target of the Evil one. If men were aware of this and taught how to battle
through in union with Christ and other men who fight the battle we would see
a dramatic reversal in the divorce rate, but in addition to this our marriages will
start to ascend to the high ideal the each of us has for our marriage. We are
just now seeing the beginning of what I believe will be the definitive battle for
humanity. Our human sexuality has long been Satan’s primary weapon
against us as human beings and we as men are beginning to finally arm
ourselves with the weapons of this spiritual battle. This is no battle for the
weak and faint of heart and if we avail ourselves of the Grace of the
Sacraments and the prayers of the mighty faithful we will prevail in glorious
and unexpected ways.

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