The Seven Laws of Love
by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
1952
TAKEN FROM THE WORLD'S FIRST LOVE
The Blessed Mother is recorded as speaking only seven times in Sacred Scripture. These seven words are here used to illustrate the seven laws of love.
1. Love Is a Choice. Every act of love is an affirmation, a preferment, a
decision. But it is also a negation. "I love you" means that I do not love
her. Because love is a choice, it means detachment from a
previous mode of life, a breaking with old bonds. Hence the Old
Testament law: "a man, therefore will leave his father and mother and
will cling to his wife" (Gen. 2:24). Along with detachment, there is
also a deep sense of attachment to the beloved. The desire in one is
met by a response on the part of the other. Courting love never asks
why one is loved. The only question love asks is, "How?" Love is never
free from difficulties: "How shall we live? How can we support
ourselves?"
God loves man even in his sin. But He would not intrude upon human nature with His Love. So He woos one of the creatures to detach herself, by an act of her will, from sinful humanity and to attach herself to Him so intimately that she might give Him a human nature to being the new humanity. The first woman made a choice which brought ruin; the New Woman is asked to make a choice for man's restoration. But there was one difficulty standing in the way: "How shall this be, seeing I know not man?" But since Divine Love is doing the courting, Divine Love shall also supply the means of embodying Itself: He that is born of her will be conceived by the Spirit of God's Love.
2. Choice Ends in Identification with the Beloved.
All love craves unity, the supplying of the lack of the self at the
store of the other. Once the will makes the choice, surrender follows,
for freedom is ours only to give away. "My will is mine to make it
thine", is on the lips of every lover. Freedom exists for the sweet
slavery of love. All love is passing from potency to act, from choice
to possession, from desire to unity, from courtship to marriage. Since
the very beginning, love was spoken of as making man and woman "two in
one flesh". One soul passes into another soul, and the body follows the
soul to such unity as it can achieve. The difference between
prostitution and love is that in the former there is the offering of
the body without the soul. True love demands that the will to love
should precede the act of possession.
After God had
courted the soul of a creature and asked her to supply Him with a human
nature and when all difficulties of how her virginity could be
preserved were cleared away, there came the great act of surrender. Fiat.
"Be it done unto me ..." --- surrender, resignation, and the
celebration of the Divine Nuptials. In another sense, there was now two
in one flesh: the Divine and human natures of the Person of Christ
lived in the womb of Mary, God and man made One. In no person in this
world was there ever such unity of God and man as Mary experienced
within her during the nine months in which she bore Him Whom the
Heavens could not contain. Mary, who was already one with Him in mind,
was nor one with Him in Body, as Love reached its peak in mothering the
wandering Word.
3. Love Requires a Constant De-egoization.
It is easy for love to take the beloved for granted and to assume that
what was freely offered for life needs no repurchasing. But love can be
treated either as an antique that needs no care or as a flower that
needs pruning. Love could become so possessive that it would hardly be
conscious of the rights of others: lest love so degenerate into a
mutual exchange of egotisms, there must be a constant going out to
others, an exteriorization, an increased searching for the formation of
an "us." Love of God is inseparable from love of neighbor. Words of
love must be translated into action, and they must go beyond the mere
boundary of the home. The needs of neighbor may become so imperative
that one may have to sacrifice one's own comfort fro another. Love that
does not expand to neighbor dies of its own too-much.
Mary obeys this third law of love, even in her pregnancy, by visiting a pregnant neighbor, an old woman who is already six months with child. From that day to this, no one who boasts of his love of God may claim exemption from the law to love his neighbor, too. Mary hastens --- Maria festinans --- across the hills to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Mary is present at a birth at this Visitation, as she will later attend a marriage at Cana and a death on Calvary: the three major moments in the life of a neighbor. Now, no sooner does an Angel visit her than she makes a visit to a woman in need. A woman is best helped by a woman, and the one woman who bears Love Divine within her casts such a spell over another woman with child that John the Baptist leaps with joy in her womb. The bearing of Christ is inseparable from the service of Christ. God the Son had come to Mary not for her sake alone but also for the sake of the world. Love is social, or it ceases to be love.
4. Love is inseparable from joy. A woman's greatest joy is when she
brings a child into the world. The father's joy is changing a woman into a
mother. Love cannot endure without joys, although these are sometimes given as
prepayments for later responsibilities. The joy of love goes out in two
directions: one is horizontal, through the extension of love in the family; the
other is vertical, a mounting to God with our thanks because He is the source of
all love. The miser is devoured by his gold, the Saint by his God.
In moments of
ecstasy, lovers ask where their love will end. Will it run out as
feeble drops of rain upon the parched sands of the desert without joy,
or will it run like rivers to the sea, and back again unto God? Love
must seek an explanation for its ecstasies and joys; it asks, "If the
spark of love is so great, what must be the flame?"
5. Love Is Inseparable from Sorrow. Because love, which demands the eternal for satisfaction, is compassed by time, it always knows some inadequacy and discontent. Trials, bereavements, and even the changes and rhythms of love itself prove a strain even to the most devoted lover. Even when love is most intense, it often throws the lover back upon himself, and he becomes conscious that, despite his desire to be one with the beloved, he is still distinct and separate. There is a limit to the total possession of another in his life. Every marriage promises what God alone can give. The Saints have the Dark Night of the soul, but all lovers have the Dark Night of the body.
If Mary is to
feel the sorrow of love, she must feel the separation from the Beloved
which comes during the three days' loss. Despite the will to be one
with the Christ-love, there comes an estrangement, a separation, a
change in moods as she asks: "Son, why hast Thou done so to us?"
"Knowest Thou not that we have sought Thee sorrowing?" The course of
true love never runs smooth. Not even the most spiritual love is exempt
from aridity, spiritual dryness, and a feeling that one has lost the
Divine Presence. In humans the superabundance of love sometimes
destroys love, so that after a while love becomes a duty. In Divine Love the richness of Divinity and its superabundance create
a need, so that the absence of God, even for three days, causes the soul the
greatest agony it can endure in this vale of tears.
6. All Love, Before It Mounts to a Higher Level, Must Die to a Lower One.
There are no plains in the kingdom of love. One is either going uphill
or coming down. There is no certainty of increasing ecstasy. If there
is no purification, the fire of passion becomes the flicker of the
sentiment and finally only the ashes of habit. No one is thirsty at the
border of a well. There is no such thing as loving too much; one either
loves madly or too little. The truth is that the law of love must
always operate: love that does not mount perishes. The joys and the
ecstasies, unless they are freshened by sacrifice, become mere
friendships. Mediocrity is the penalty of all those who refuse to add
sacrifice to their love, and thus to prepare it for a wider horizon and
a higher peak.
At the Marriage
Feast of Cana, Mary had an opportunity to keep the love of her Son only
to herself alone, She had the choice of continuing to be only the
Mother of Jesus. But she knew that she must not keep that love for
herself alone under the penalty of never enjoying love to the fullest.
If she would save Jesus, she must lose Him. So she asked Him to work
His first miracle, to begin His public life, and to anticipate the hour
--- and that means His Passion and Death. At that moment, when she
asked water to be changed into wine, she died to love of Jesus as her
Son, and began to mount to that higher love for all whom Jesus would
redeem when He died on the Cross. Cana was the death of the mother-Son
relationship, and the beginning of that higher love involved in the
Mother-humanity Christ-redeemed relationship. And by giving up her Son
for the world, she eventually got Him back --- even in the Assumption
and the Coronation.
7. The End of All Human Love Is Doing the Will of God.
Even the most frivolous speak of love in terms of eternity. Love is
timeless. As a true love develops, there are at first two loves facing
one another, seeking to possess one another. As love progresses, the
two loves, instead of seeking one another, seek an object outside both.
They both develop a passion for unity outside themselves, namely, in
God. That is why, as a pure Christian love matures, a husband and
spouse become more and more religious as time goes on. At first the
happiness consisted in doing the will of the other; then the happiness
consisted in doing the will of God. True love is a religious act.If I love you as God wills that I love you, it is the highest
expression of love.
The last words
of Mary that were spoken in Sacred Scripture were the words of total
abandonment to the will of God. "Whatsoever He shall say to you that do
ye." As Dante said: "In His will is our peace." Love has no other
destiny than to obey Christ. Our wills are ours only to give away. The
human heart is torn between a sense of emptiness and a need of being
filled, like the water pots of Cana. The emptiness comes from the fact
that we are human. The power of filling belongs only to Him Who ordered
the water pots filled. Lest any heart should fail in being filled,
Mary's last valedictory is: "Whatsoever He shall say to you, that do
ye." The heart has a need of emptying and a need of being filled. The
power of emptying is human-emptying in the love of others --- the power
of filling belongs only to God. Hence all perfect love must end on the
note: "Not my will, but Thine be done, O Lord!"
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