Gift Love And Need Love

Gift Love And Need Love

“God is Love”, says St. John. I thought that his maxim would provide me with a very plain highroad through the whole subject. I thought I should be able to say that human loves deserved to be called loved at all just in so fast as they resembled that love which is God. The first distinction I made was therefore between what I called Gift love and Need love. The typical of example gift love would be that love which moves a man to work and plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he will die without sharing or seeing; of the second, that which sends a lonely or frightened child to its mother’s arms.

There was no doubt which was more like love Himself. Divine love is Gift love. The father gives all He is and has to the Son. The Son gives Himself back to the Father, and gives Himself to the world, and for the world to the Father, and thus gives the world (in Himself) back to the Father too.

And what, on the other hand, can be less like anything we believe of God’s life than Need love? He lacks nothing, but our need love, as Plato saw, is “the son of poverty”. It is the accurate reflection in consciousness of our actual nature. We are born helplines. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves….

Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God. But man’s love for God, from the very nature of the case, must always be very largely, and must often be entirely, a Need love. This is obvious when we implore forgiveness for our sins or support in our tribulations. But in the long run it is perhaps even more apparent in our growing – for it ought to be growing – awareness that our whole being by its very nature is one vast need, incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose….

It would be a bold and silly creature that came before its Creator with the boast, “I’m no beggar. I love you disinterestedly”. Those who come nearest to a Gift love for God will next moment, even at the very same moment, be beating their breast with the publican and laying their indigence before the only real Giver. And God will have it so. He addressees our Need love: “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy-laden”, or, in the Old Testament, “Open your mouth wide and I will fill it”….