Our Call to Love

Following is an excerpt from The Christian State of Life by
Hans Urs von Balthasar. Much of the chapter this is taken from has been left out as I just wanted to capture what in my opinion are the highlights of his meditation. I can forward a copy to anyone who would like the entire chapter.

“Master, which is the great commandment in the law?” He answers them, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments depend the whole law and the prophets” (Mt 22:36-40).

… the commandments are so completely contained in the dual commandment of love of God and love of neighbor that whoever keeps this commandment, on which the whole law and the prophets depend, has done all that is necessary.

Without love, on the other hand, even the perfect observance of the commandments is meaningless and useless …. this commandment is so unconditional and inflexible in its formulation, so transcendent of time and so apparently immutable in the face of every human ability or inability to observe it, every hope and doubt, every striving and failure, even every conviction, that no one on earth can seriously claim to have observed it in its entirety; that we are, in fact, more likely to regard it as an expression of wishful thinking, of an ideal but unattainable polestar riding high above the lowlands of human wretchedness, than as the commandment it actually is.

But the Lord does not call this commandment a wish on the part of God or a recommendation … he does not speak of it as a steep path beside which there are other—easier—ones.

“A new commandment I give you, that you love one another: that as I have loved you, you also love one another. By this will all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:34-35).

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15:12), it has also become the criterion of our love of God: “He who has my commandments and keeps them”—precisely these commandments of love—“he it is who loves me” (Jn 14:21).

If we do not love, we have so completely failed to fulfill our calling that we are dead even though our bodies are still alive: “He who does not love abideth in death” (1 Jn 3:14).

Thus the principle is affirmed that the calling to love is an absolute one, admitting of no exception, and so ineluctable that failure to observe it is tantamount to total corruption. Let there be no doubt. We are here to love—to love God and to love our neighbor. Whoever will unravel the meaning of existence must accept this fundamental principle from whose center light is shed on all the dark recesses of our lives. For this love to which we are called is not a circumscribed or limited love, not a love defined, as it were, by the measure of our human weakness. It does not allow us to submit just one part of our lives to its demands and leave the rest free for other pursuits; it does not allow us to dedicate just one period of our lives to it and the rest, if we will, to our own interests. The command to love is universal and unequivocal. It makes no allowances. It encompasses and makes demands upon everything in our nature: “with thy whole heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”.

… this commandment takes no heed of our human potential for observing it. All that is important is that it be observed; how this is to be done is a second question with which the first is not concerned. If we are unable to observe it by our own strength, God will not fail to give us the means to do so. But one thing God will not do: He will not accommodate his great commandment to our human insufficiency. For he knows there is only one thing that love cannot endure: to have limits set to it.

Love has its origin in God, who is eternal and boundless life. A love that is not active, that is not ready to prove itself in ever new and different ways, is not love.

It can never mean that it has reached the limit of its capacity to love … and can now find comfort in the thought that it has fulfilled its obligation to love. If such a thought enters the love of two individuals, their love is already growing cold.

Love can never give itself sufficiently, can never exhaust its ingenuity in preparing new joys for the beloved, is never so satisfied with itself and its deeds that it does not look for new proofs of love, is never so familiar with the person of the beloved that it does not crave the wonderment of new knowledge.

“Obligation”, then, is a word that pure love does not know. Or rather: its “obligation” is always a “choice”. It experiences the necessity it is under of loving the beloved as the highest and most perfect freedom—a freedom not to be exchanged for all the goods of this world.

What lover would not gladly lay the whole world at the feet of the beloved? If we love, we do not know the difference between command and wish. The wish of the beloved is our command. We forestall every unspoken desire on the lips of the beloved and fulfill it.

We are not asking here whether this is the nature of human beings or whether and to what extent they are capable of loving in this way ….

… in every purest expression of it, we encounter anew the mystery of self-giving. For the sake of the beloved, love would gladly renounce all its possessions if it could thereby enrich the beloved.

We cannot perceive of love as a merely penultimate good of our spirit, cannot reserve for it a circumscribed place in our soul, cannot assign to it but a limited portion of our strength.

The spirit of love is a spirit of self-giving and, consequently, of “choice”. It is nothing but self-giving. For this reason, it needs no other law than itself; all other laws are subsumed, fulfilled, transcended in the one law of love.

von Balthasar, Hans Urs. The Christian State of Life (Kindle Locations 176-415). Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.