Supernatural Need Love of God And Of One Another

Supernatural Need Love of God And Of One Another

That such a Gift Love comes by Grace and should be called Charity, everyone will agree…God, as it seems to me, bestows two other gifts: A supernatural Need love of Himself and A supernatural Need love of one another…..

Let us consider first this supernatural Need love of Himself, bestowed by Grace. Of course the Grace does not create the need. That is there already “given” (as the mathematicians say) in the mere fact of our being creatures, and incalculably increased by our being fallen creatures. What the Grace gives is the full recognition, the sensible awareness, the complete acceptance, even, with certain reservation, the glad acceptance – of this Need. For, without Grace, our wishes and our necessities are in conflict….

No sooner do we believe that God loves us than there is an impulse to believe that he does so, not because He is Love, but because we are intrinsically lovable…Thus, depth beneath depth and subtlety within subtlety, there remains some lingering idea of our own, our very own, attractiveness. It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun shines upon us. Surely, we must have a little – however little – native luminosity? Surely, we can’t be quite creatures? For this tangled absurdity of a Need, even a Need love, which never fully acknowledges its own neediness. Grace substitutes a full, childlike, and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence. We become “jolly beggars”….

But God also transform our Need love for one another….How difficult it is to receive, and to go on receiving, from others a love that does not depend on our own attraction, can be seen from an extreme case. Suppose yourself a man struck down shortly after marriage by an incurable disease which may not kill you for many years; useless, impotent, hideous, disgusting, dependent on your wife’s earnings, impoverishing where you hoped to enrich; impaired even in intellect and shaken by gusts of uncontrollable temper, full of unavoidable demands. And suppose your wife’s care and pity to be inexhaustible. The man who can take this sweetly, who can receive all and give nothing without resentment, who can abstain even from those tiresome self-deprecation which are really only a demand for petting and reassurance, is doing something which Need love in its merely natural condition could not attain….In such a care to receive is harder and perhaps more blessed than to give. But what the extreme example illustrates is universal. We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is not one’s fault if they do no so love it. Only the lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill.

We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some time – and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit – they are receiving charity, are loved not because they are lovable, but because Love Himself is in those who love them…