The Ugliness of Love
I posted this at another website that was discussing the relics of saints, and the different reactions to them.
True Love Is Ugly
The human person is drawn to and by the beautiful. There is indeed an aesthetic side to how God communicates with us, and how we communicate with each other. God is himself the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. As well, God is Love.
There is another side, though. The world as we know it is fallen. The path through which we walk is a vale of tears. We experience both the beauty of our world and its fallenness. However, the world cannot admit ugliness, it can only countenance the beautiful, as witnessed by hollywood, plastic surgery, anorexia/bulimia, and euthanasia. My reflections of late have led me to see that at times, perhaps often, true love is ugly. If you love Christ in his sacrifice, as he hung from the cross, his body whipped and pierced, for us, then it could be no other way.
Pope John Paul II was himself an artist, an actor, who I strongly suspect would have followed Stanislavski's method acting, as the actor incarnates, brings to life, that character he portrays. But late in his life, he became a smaller man, a disabled man, who drooled as he spoke, who would not hide the reality of his bodiliness. Why? The short answer is, for us. He was naked and was not ashamed. He held his dignity even as he revealed his woundedness, and united that wound with Christ's wounds. As his end of life was covered simultaneously with Terri Schiavo's he spoke to the world. It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what if it is truer to say that with time we come to see a beauty that is not available to the world, such as it is with a spouse, a loved one who is ill, a child with Down's syndrome. It is not hard for those who grew up with, or old with, this pope, to love him still.
As a boy I was the only one on the baseball team who refused to go to the funeral of a team members' relative. The thought of seeing a dead body repulsed and scared me. That is where I began, but not where I am today.
Looking back over my personal life, I ask myself, "Who loved me?" And, "How do I know?" The answer (one answer) is, my father. After his conversion experience, he would share the love that he came to know of his God, Father Son and Holy Spirit. And it would overwhelm him, and he would lose his composure, sometimes witnessing in public, because the love and forgiveness he experienced would cause him to weep. It overwhelmed me, embarrassed me. But I know beyond doubt that he loves me. And I would be so lost without it.
So I am grateful to my father, and our Holy Father, and our Father above, for ugly things.
True Love Is Ugly
The human person is drawn to and by the beautiful. There is indeed an aesthetic side to how God communicates with us, and how we communicate with each other. God is himself the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. As well, God is Love.
There is another side, though. The world as we know it is fallen. The path through which we walk is a vale of tears. We experience both the beauty of our world and its fallenness. However, the world cannot admit ugliness, it can only countenance the beautiful, as witnessed by hollywood, plastic surgery, anorexia/bulimia, and euthanasia. My reflections of late have led me to see that at times, perhaps often, true love is ugly. If you love Christ in his sacrifice, as he hung from the cross, his body whipped and pierced, for us, then it could be no other way.
Pope John Paul II was himself an artist, an actor, who I strongly suspect would have followed Stanislavski's method acting, as the actor incarnates, brings to life, that character he portrays. But late in his life, he became a smaller man, a disabled man, who drooled as he spoke, who would not hide the reality of his bodiliness. Why? The short answer is, for us. He was naked and was not ashamed. He held his dignity even as he revealed his woundedness, and united that wound with Christ's wounds. As his end of life was covered simultaneously with Terri Schiavo's he spoke to the world. It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what if it is truer to say that with time we come to see a beauty that is not available to the world, such as it is with a spouse, a loved one who is ill, a child with Down's syndrome. It is not hard for those who grew up with, or old with, this pope, to love him still.
As a boy I was the only one on the baseball team who refused to go to the funeral of a team members' relative. The thought of seeing a dead body repulsed and scared me. That is where I began, but not where I am today.
Looking back over my personal life, I ask myself, "Who loved me?" And, "How do I know?" The answer (one answer) is, my father. After his conversion experience, he would share the love that he came to know of his God, Father Son and Holy Spirit. And it would overwhelm him, and he would lose his composure, sometimes witnessing in public, because the love and forgiveness he experienced would cause him to weep. It overwhelmed me, embarrassed me. But I know beyond doubt that he loves me. And I would be so lost without it.
So I am grateful to my father, and our Holy Father, and our Father above, for ugly things.
posted by erico at 2:32 PM
3 Comments:
Speaking of the relics of the saints, did you see the photo of Dymphna's avatar, the statue of St. Dymphna on her profile? St. Dymphna is the patron saint of lunatics and abused children. Dymphna can tell you more about her.
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Eric,
I read the piece you had written in defense of the Pope's decision to accept the suffering of his days and weeks as a kind of witness or testament to the goodness and love of life. Reading it reminded me of something said by St. Augustine, Aquinas, and Lonergan about the redemptive value of learning to accept suffering in an act of love which can bring good out of evil. I was writing about Aquinas and had written a long footnote about it. Eric, if you would like, I can make a photocopy of an English translation of Lonergan's work, "The Incarnate Word." The last section deals with the Law of the Cross. Here below is my long footnote within quotation marks about the redemptive character of suffering:
"Augustine, Enchiridion, c. 11, cited by Bernard Lonergan, Topics in Education: The Cincinnati Lectures of 1959 on the Philosophy of Education, eds. Robert M. Doran and Frederick E. Crowe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 29, n. 10. As Lonergan quotes this text in the Incarnate Word, p. 386:
For the almighty God who...has supreme power over all things, being himself supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among his works, if he were not so omnipotent and so good that he can bring good out of evil.
In the same work (Enchiridion, c. 27, cited by Lonergan, p. 386), Augustine later adds, "he judged it better to bring good out of evil, than not to permit evil to exist." God could have set things up differently as Augustine elsewhere admits (cf. De Agone Christiano, 11, 12; ML, 40: 297, cited by Lonergan, Incarnate Word, p. 366; and De Trinitate, 13, 13, cited by Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3a, q. 1, a. 2 although as 13, 10) and as Aquinas also himself admits (in the Summa Theologiae, 3a, q. 1, a. 2; q. 46, aa. 1-2) but, as Augustine says to his listeners and readers, "if he had done otherwise, your foolishness would be just as unhappy with that." As Aquinas argues in q. 46, a. 1, God has ends and purposes of His own which know the good which He wishes to accomplish and as this good is present to Him in His unrestricted self-understanding. This good, admittedly, is not known by us
in any direct way because it is a transcendent reality which surpasses the proportionality of what can be known by our incarnate human understanding. An apprehension of some meaning can only come from an inquiry which acknowledges the fact that no human agent is able to create a system of living whereby, as a consequence of failure, good can come about."
--Brother Dunstan
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