3rd Sunday of Easter – 1 May 2022

Often, it’s out of children, the youngest, that we hear the most wisdom.  Children have the most disarming way of speaking the truth.  And they have an uncanny capacity for observation – especially for when it comes to understanding the nature of love.  At weddings I often like to share these delightful observations about love

Q – When is it ok to kiss someone?

A -You should never kiss a girl unless you have enough bucks to buy her a big ring and her own DVD, because she’ll want to have videos of the wedding. (Jim, age 10)

Q – What is the right age to get married?
A – Twenty-three is the best age because you know the person FOREVER by then. (Camille, age 10)

Q – How do you decide who to marry?
A – You got to find somebody who likes the same stuff. Like, if you like sports, she should like it that you like sports, and she should keep the chips and dip coming. (Alan, age 10)

I’ m not rushing into being in love.  I’m finding fourth grade hard enough. (Regina, age 10)

But then we come across some deeper observations:

Don’t say you love somebody and then change your mind.  Love isn’t like picking what movie you want to watch (Natalie, age 9)

No person really decides before they grow up who they’re going to marry. God decides it all way before, and you get to find out later who you’re stuck with. (Kristen, age 10)

Each of us grows into understanding what love is really all about.  Discovering it is the adventure of life.  It’s not easy to put words around it, but we know, nonetheless, that only with love and through love do we become fully ourselves.  It is the heart of life.  However, given that love is so significant, important as oxygen itself, it is surprising that, like children, we struggle to define it for most of our lives. It is a struggle that is appreciated in particular by Pope Francis. In his letter Amoris Laetitia, “The Joy of Love” he puts before us four emphases about the nature of love, relationships and family. Given our Gospel this Sunday in which Jesus asks about the quality of our love, I thought to share these with you.

The first is fidelity to our long tradition of reflection on life and love. As Pope Francis emphatically comments towards the end of the letter, “in order to avoid all misunderstanding, I would point out that in no way must the Church desist from proposing the full ideal of marriage, God’s plan in all of its grandeur. . .  a lukewarm attitude, any kind of relativism, or an undue reticence in proposing that ideal, would be a lack of fidelity to the Gospel.” (n. 307). Our families, yes even in their imperfection, are the place in which we learn what it is to be human.  It is “the primary place of socialisation, since it where we first learn to relate to others, to listen and share, to be patient and show respect, to help one another and live as one” (n. 276) in such a way that ultimately has the capacity to disclose to us something of the very mystery of God who as St. Pope John Paul II described saying, “Our God in his deepest mystery is not solitude, but a family.” (n.11)

At the same time Pope Francis presents the situation of families today with realism. As he writes, “no family drops down from heaven perfectly formed” (n. 325), and, “It is not helpful to dream of an idyllic and perfect love needing no stimulus to grow.”  No, “It is much healthier to be realistic about our limits, our defects and imperfections, and to respond to the call to grow together, to bring love to maturity . . .” (n.135).  As he goes onto say, “The life of every family is marked by all kinds of crises” (nn.232-234), All of this takes us to the pope’s principle of spiritual realism.  As he writes, “The spiritual journey of each – as Dietrich Bonhoeffer nicely put it – needs to help them to a certain ‘disillusionment’ with regard to the other, to stop expecting from that person something which is proper to the love of God alone.” (n. 320).  Beyond this, too, family life today is, indeed, also under many kinds of cultural pressures which erode its capacity for stability and permanence which the pope very skilfully articulates (nn. 31-56). And he admits that we, as a Church, have often not helped the matter, ourselves, in the way that at times we have presented our Christian beliefs. We too need, as the pope writes, “a health dose of self-criticism.” (n. 36)

However, in all of this, as he declares, “we should not be trapped into wasting our energy in doleful laments, but rather see new forms of missionary creativity.” (n. 57).  And this leads us then into the third significant feature of the letter:  Pope Francis seeks to teach us not just about love in an ethereal way but how to love in practical ways.  One of the most beautiful chapters is the fourth in which the pope offers us a commentary on the passage by St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians on the nature of love, which he then extends in the following chapter into what this means for parents, children, and every member of the family, and at each step of the journey of family life.  Throughout this, as he observes, “the family has always been the nearest hospital. So let us care for one other, guide and encourage one another, and experience [precisely] this as part of our family spirituality.” (n. 321)

Fourthly, the approach of Francis is to invite us all into a sustained discernment about our own and other’s situation of marriage.  We are to approach one another’s situation, even if it be less than the ideal, with reverence and attention. There is a ‘gradualness’ not in law, but in our capacity to exercise our freedom in respect to the law (n. 295).  And this entails avoiding “judgements which do not take into account the complexity of various situations and to be attentive to how people experience distress because of their condition.” (n. 296).  There is no simple “recipe” (n.298), and therefore we have to enter into a careful discernment of each situation, always alert to how we can celebrate people’s communion with the life of the Church (n. 300).  As the pope concludes, “When a responsible and tactful person who does not presume to put his or her own desires ahead of the common good of the Church, meets with a pastor capable of acknowledging the seriousness of the matter before him, there can be no risk that a specific discernment may lead people to think that the Church maintains a double standard.” (n. 300). In all of this, we are to “remember that a small step, in the midst of great human limitations, can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order, but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties” (n.305).

On several occasions in the letter, Pope Francis returns to one of his preferred words, ‘tenderness’.  As he summarises, “Tenderness is expressed in a particular way by exercising loving care in treating the limitations of the other, especially when they are evident.”  We cannot love without tenderness.  And it is tenderness that in the end transforms the world. It transforms the world because it disarms and changes hearts.  May we learn its logic, for then we will become living definitions of what love is all about.