Love’s many faces

NO, I don’t mean that love is about double-dealing, hypocrisy or chameleonic deception. Much less is it a form of madness, a kind of bipolar psychological disorder involving multiple personalities.

Sadly, some people have mistaken love to be those, aside from accusing it of being blind. Thus, it is important that lovers be mature persons to be able to distinguish love from its dangerous look-alikes.

There’s one consistent and unchanging core in love. It is to give oneself unstintingly to another. But it is in its nature to be highly versatile, inventive, flexible, creative. Love cannot be caught stuck in only one rigid form of expression. It sings and dances with any tune.

Thus, you have St. Paul saying, “To the Jews, I became a Jew that I might gain the Jews…To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak. I became all things to all men, that I might save all.” (1 Cor 9) Amazing, don’t you agree?

This is because love always feels the need to adapt itself always to its beloved. It’s never selfish. It’s joy is in the beloved’s joy. And it’s not blind at all. It is fiercely perceptive and choosy. And it picks what is best for the beloved.

If anyone says he is in love and does not feel this dynamics of love, he better see a doctor or psychiatrist or a spiritual director. He most likely is sick. A lover by nature enjoys some fullness of life. His condition transcends earthly factors.

A lover does not know boredom. He ignores tiredness and buries complacency and passivity. A certain ardor burns in his heart. For discretion, he may not show these externally. But inside him, he is all in flames.

Of course, it helps in loving for one to be gifted with an open, warm and sunshiny disposition. But a lot more is needed. Love requires all the virtues, and true love actually spawns and develops them. Yes, love is synonymous with fertility.

This is because love itself is the mother virtue. The other virtues cover only so much. Love covers the whole spectrum of all possible human conditions. It’s what gives meaning, order and direction to all the other virtues.

And neither is love an on-and-off affair. It needs to work and function all the time. In fact, it should go with the very beating of the heart, since it actually is the language proper to the heart.

Still a lot more is needed for us to love properly. We need God, for God is love. He is the source, pattern and end of love. We can only love properly when we are with God. Otherwise, we will just be playing games.

Again, we hear St. Paul saying, “I can do all things in him who strengthens me.” (Phil 4,13) God is the power proper to love. Without God, love is doomed to failure.

This is the kind of love that can fuse and blend contrasting qualities, unavoidable in loving, one soft the other hard, one lenient and tolerant the other strict and impatient, one sweet the other bitter.

If we look at Christ, God’s full revelation to us, that’s what we see. Extremely nice to us, he allows us to use our freedom and even to sin. At the same time, he is extremely hard as to ask us to carry the cross with him and enter by the narrow gate.

In him, the tension between freedom and obedience, mercy and justice, joy and suffering, patience and prompt action, compassion and correction, truth and discretion, etc., is overcome.

This skill to resolve contrasting values, only possible in Christ and with Christ, is what we have to attain. For this we need to study his doctrine and example, we need to develop virtues, we need nothing less than grace.

With all the profusion of things these days, driven by ever developing technologies, and the corresponding profusion of mentalities, styles, situations, etc., we need to rev up our capacity to love by learning to be as versatile as Christ himself.