Love's Triangle

Yesterday's Psalm (145: 10-11) response struck me:  "Your friends make known, O Lord, the glorious splendor of your kingdom."

What struck me is the idea that living, in friendship, the two great commandments of love of God and neighbor, allows God's Trinitarian nature, his "glorious splendor," to be revealed in the world.

The first great commandment is to love God wholly:  "to will or desire his glory."  J-P Torrell, "Charity as Friendship," in Christ and Spirituality, at 56.  Loving God is only possible because God loves us, and so enables us to love him. Our love for others arises out of God's love for us. "In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us." (1st letter of John). "You did not choose me, but I chose you." John 15:15.

God makes friendship with him possible by making us adopted sons and daughters by his love, says Torrell. "'I say, you are god' (Jn 10:34)."  "[G]race introduces us into the family of God and puts us as it were on the divine level, thus making [the reciprocity of love] possible."  Unlike the Greeks who could not accept that there could be a relationship of love between the gods and man, the Judeo-Christian tradition believes God does love and can be loved.  A reciprocity of love between God and man is possible.

It is God's love for us that enables us to love God, ourselves and others in friendship.  We love both ourselves and others properly when we love in consideration of God and for God's sake, since it is God that knows each person's true good.  God is the ever-present "third" that makes love complete and true.  True human love, then, whose model is friendship, is a reflection and image of God's own trinitarian love.

To love myself is properly to want for myself the highest good, which is actually that God's will for me be done. To love myself is not, properly speaking, selfish.  "If I want the divine good for this friend of God that I am, it is in order that I might belong to God and be for his sake.  He is the ultimate end I have in view, not myself." Ibid, 57. 

Likewise, to love my neighbor is to will for him or her what I will for myself: the highest good, that God's will for that person be done.  "I desire these goods for my friend, not for his or her sake, in the sense that he or she would be the ultimate end, but rather because of God and in order that he or she might belong to God." Ibid.

According to Torrell (who is expounding St. Thomas Aquinas), even the command to love our enemies makes sense by this way of thinking because we love our enemies for the sake of our friend, God.  We don't love an enemy because of the evil he does, but because he is "a friend of a friend," i.e., his is still beloved of God despite his evil deeds.  And so we hope, pray and encourage him return to a right relationship with God, his true good.

Lived out, our friendships with God, ourselves and others, reveal in the world the glorious nature of God's love, the point of the responsorial psalm.  To my mind, this means the world is not ultimately "secular" or neutral and devoid of the presence of God, but from the beginning full of God's "glorious splendor," which we experience, share, and reveal, through true friendships.