We Decide Every Day to Love

"When did you decide to become a priest?" the seminarians asked the older professor of theology.  "This morning, when I got out of bed," he replied. 

According to the priest who told us this story, each one of us must decide every day that we want to be a wife, a husband, a mother, a father, or whatever it is we have taken on with our lives.  If we don't decide every day, we "won't be," as he said.

I think this is right on -- we tend to get distracted by new goals every day, and forget our most basic commitments.  Somehow, I wish I had taken this advice to heart when my children were small--I think I was the most distracted mother on the planet; I was always taken by surprise that my children actually needed me.

Soren Kierkegaard writes of three possible outlooks on life--what he calls the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.  He says that all of us are born aesthetes, and we can become ethical or religious only through our choices.  According to him, the aesthete does not ask whether something is good or bad, but only whether it is interesting.  Everything is judged as to whether it is fascinating, thrilling, exciting, and entertaining.  In order to live an "interesting" life, the aesthete must cast off society's expectations and "be free."  But Kierkegaard says that the aesthete is not free at all; in fact, he is living the accidental life--he is driven by his temperament, tastes, feelings, and impulses.  He is controlled by circumstances, so that whenever something is no longer "interesting," the aesthete begins to feel that it is pointless.

According to Kierkegaard, only when we commit ourselves to loving day in and day out do we cease to be a pawn of outside forces; only when we continue to love when it is not thrillling can we actually be said to be loving the other person, and not the feelings and experiences they give us.

When Jesus says, "Love one another as I have loved you," He is not commanding us to have warm feelings, affection, or approval of one another.  He is commanding us to act in love toward one another.  Our feelings are notoriously inconsistent; our behavior need not be.  We do not need to feel love in order to give it -- in order to seek the good of the other person.

If we act in love, we establish the feelings of love -- this is a great mystery in a world that is so afraid of "being hypocritical."    If we injure someone we dislike, we will dislike him even more; if we do him a favor, we will dislike him less.  So the Christian who is trying to love his neighbor despite how he feels about his neighbor, finds himself liking more and more people as time goes on.

Jesus did not speak much about "going to heaven," but about the kingdom of God "among us."  And He knew how that would come about -- if all of us act as if we love one another, we will create and sustain the kingdom on earth.