Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith by Robert Barron

Author:Robert Barron
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, Catholicism, Christianity
ISBN: 9780307720535
Publisher: Image
Published: 2011-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

Corinth, Greece. WORD ON FIRE

And this is why, Paul explains, “Love is patient, love is kind” (1 Cor 13:4). Many of us are good or just to someone else so that he or she, in turn, might be good or just to us. This is not love, but rather indirect egotism. When we are caught in the rhythm of that sort of reciprocal exchange, we are very impatient with any negative response to a positive overture that we have made. If someone responds to our kindness with hostility or even indifference, we quickly withdraw our benevolence. But the person characterized by true love is not interested in reciprocation but simply in the good of the other, and therefore he is willing to wait out any resistance. He is long-suffering and kind. This is also why, as Paul insists, “[love] is not jealous, [it] is not pompous, it is not inflated” (1 Cor 13:4). Gore Vidal, the American novelist, described with admirable honesty the feeling of envy this way: “when a friend of mine succeeds, something in me dies.” True love hasn’t a thing to do with this sort of resentment, for it wants the success of the other. And the person who loves is not conceited, because she feels no need to raise herself above the other. Just the contrary: she wants the other to be elevated, and hence she takes the lower place with joy. Once we understand the nature of true love, we know why “It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13:7). Because the one who loves is not focused on himself but on the object of his love, he is not preoccupied with his own weariness or disappointment or frustration. Instead he looks ahead, hoping against hope, attending to the needs of the one he loves.

Paul concludes his encomium with the observation that “Love never fails” (1 Cor 13:8). In heaven, when we are sharing the divine life, even faith will end, for we will see and no longer merely believe; hope will end, for our deepest longing will have been realized. But love will endure, because heaven is love. Heaven is the state of being in which everything that is not love has been burned away. And that is why “faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13). Paul here has named the essence not only of his own theology but of the Christian life itself. Everything else is commentary.

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