Young Adult
A lot of times when you enter the home of a practicing Catholic, you can tell immediately. A matching set of Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart on the wall, a collection of Bible scenes or paintings of saints, a shelf full of C.S. Lewis and Fulton Sheen, and always so very many rosaries. I think this comes from the beautiful desire to see reminders of the one we love. As Catholics, we are blessed with an abundance of physical manifestations of our faith, and these things are good, unless they take the place of interior transformation. When the external expressions of our faith become checkboxes on the path to achieving holiness by our own strength, as opposed to being expressions of an interior reality of relationship with God, something has gone missing. Can you imagine what would happen in the Church and in the world if it was as immediately clear that it was a Catholic you were talking to as it is when you walk into their house? I don’t mean because of their Catholic swag or religious art tattoos or because they are holding their Bible and journal and spiritual reading book all in a neat stack. I mean what St. Paul said should be the way that people know we are Christians: by our love.
In the digital age, and especially in our Western culture, we tend to think it’s our job to argue people into Catholicism. The truth matters immensely, and we can rest secure in the truth we have received from Christ through his Church. But for most people the thing that changes their heart or helps them to grow in virtue is not arguments but relationships.
Love can include a lot of things: It can include conversations and arguments and even corrections; it can include warm feelings of consolation and expressions of affection. Genuine expressions of love can range from profound anger to passionate desire to quiet acts of service heroically offered from a place of desolation. All of those things are good in their proper context, that is, all of those things are good when they are rooted in a core reverence for the specific human being in front of you and the choice to will their good. But without that central and specific motivation, all of those pieces of love run the risk of becoming, as St. Paul said, “a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”
When love is genuine, when those expressions come from choosing the good of the specific person in their specific needs, love can change a person’s life. It certainly has changed mine. I know a lot of very smart Catholics, but it is not their intelligence or their ability to call out what I’m doing wrong that changes my life. It is the way they love me.
In seeking to imitate the kind of love that has changed my life, I find it helpful to notice some of the component parts that tend to go into the act of loving someone well. These component parts have made such an impact on my life that I have talked about them in these columns multiple times. I have talked about St. John Paul II and the Sisters of Life and what it feels like when someone approaches you with reverence. I’ve talked about the importance of attention and that where you give your attention is, practically speaking, where you give your love. I’ve talked about comedy as a school for humility and how a full acceptance of who you are and trust that you are beloved exactly as you are allows you to move through the world with humility that looks more like confidence than like self-hatred. People with this kind of security don’t need my attention, they don’t need to earn their worth by saying all the right things to me. From that place of security, they are able to approach with reverence and give their attention without needing to be focused on themselves. I have a lot of people in my life who are good at these things, and I have some people in my life who are extraordinarily good at these things. Those are the people who have changed my life. The way they treat me is an icon of the love of God. From them I learn that I, as a person, am worth the effort it will take to grow in virtue. I learn that mistakes don’t define my worth and that my core identity is beloved. From that healed understanding of who I am comes humility and security and the ability to love others like they do. Or at least, I am starting to learn these things. I am slow to learn, and my love is still incredibly weak. But it is growing stronger thanks to the people who have loved me well.
And that makes sense. If God himself is love, we imitate him when we love. His love brought the whole cosmos into being, and when we love even a little bit like he does, it sends ripple effects of goodness out into the world. The more closely we imitate him the more we draw others to him. To bring God into everything means to bring love into everything.
Sacred art and rosaries and bookshelves full of Catholic books are beautiful and wonderful and an expression of the reality of the God who loves us. But we ourselves are also icons of that same God, living and breathing and moving through the world. The more we imitate him in his love, the more we allow him to express his love through us, and the more we will change the world.
