How can you mend a broken heart?

So there are a couple people in my life that make lots of bad decisions. (I don’t think they read this blog, but I won’t name names anyway.)

I’m not talking about decisions I disagree with, like choosing the creme brulee when there’s chocolate mousse on the menu. I’m talking about undeniably bad decisions, like burning bridges and painting yourself into a corner.

It’s hard to love someone in that situation, for two reasons. First, their bad decisions put up obstacles to receiving love; and second, I just stop wanting to love that person.

The limits of love

To love is to will the good of the one you love. But I’m not able by my own power to make good things happen for those I love. I’m just a guy, a mere mortal, with not much money or fame or power. So it may be very very good for a friend to get a new car, but I can’t afford to buy it for them. A friend may want a spouse desperately, but I can’t wave my wand and make romance spark. Someone may be suffering from an incurable disease of mind or body, but I’m not God that I can heal them.

So my love is limited by my ability to actually accomplish some good thing for those I love. But sadly that’s not the only limiting factor. Love can also be limited by a refusal to accept the good that I can and do give.

I know I’ve refused love myself in the past. (I probably still do more often than I admit to myself.) An obvious example is my lack of gratitude for the gifts my grandparents gave me when I was a child. I was a Star Wars fanboy, and I was obsessed with getting the Millennium Falcon playset – come on, who wasn’t? And I was so focused on getting the one thing I wanted that, when I didn’t get it, I practically spat on the action figures and Darth Vader carrying case that they did give me. I did return some action figures to the store, not because I had them already, but because I wanted something different.

More subtle refusals arose out of fear, rather than greed. I turn down offers of company when I’m feeling depressed, or I turn down offers of help when my pride is hurt, all because I’m afraid of my own weakness or of some imagined future regret.

So love can be inadequate to the need, or love can be refused. But there’s a third limitation as well: my own heart can grow cold.

All those rom-com superlatives, “I’ll love you forever!” and “Nothing can stop my love for you!” really do describe the ideal of what love is about – both romantic love and charitable love. As St. Paul puts it, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” But my emotions come and go, and there are lots of times I just don’t bear all things, or hope all things. There are times when, as a feeling anyway, my love comes to an end.

And that’s where the virtue of love kicks in.

Loving when it’s tough

Virtue is all about actions; feelings (or “passions”) are important only in that they give information or motivation to act. But an emotion is not a virtue, and a virtuous action doesn’t require feeling in the moment. Most of the time, it’s the action that gives rise to the related feeling rather than the other way around.

So taking the actions of love, even when my own heart is cold, is the way to grow in the virtue of love. It also reminds me that love involves the brain as well as the heart and the gut.

Dealing with my friends who are making bad decisions requires me to think things through: what is actually in my ability to do? what are they able or willing to receive from me? and how can I overcome my own fear or resentment toward them?

It keeps going, and going, and going...

I’m working my way through Thomas Aquinas’s description of Charity, or Love as a theological virtue, and I’m fascinated by the way he distinguishes Charity from other forms of love. For example, he insists that Charity, properly speaking, is more than a natural virtue. It is not something we can achieve by our own power.

As stated above (Question 23, Article 1), charity is a friendship of man for God, founded upon the fellowship of everlasting happiness.

He later notes that Charity applies to other people because they share with us this fellowship of everlasting happiness in God. But God is always first, and is the source and reason for all Charity.

Now, it’s very important to me that my blog be accessible and welcoming to non-Catholics and non-Christians and non-theists even. This is because, even though I’m firmly convinced of the truth of Catholic teaching, I’m just as firmly convinced that I’m only able to understand and act on that truth in the concrete people and situations of everyday life. Even if the Catholic Church is one of the biggest religions on earth, it’s still only claims less than a quarter of all Americans, and less than one-sixth of the people on this planet. In other words, most of the people I meet and connect with and become friends with are not Catholic. And all these people are my teachers in the virtue of love.

Can non-Christians love?

That said, I’m not going to just reject Thomas’ idea that genuine virtuous love is fundamentally the love of God. Thomas is much smarter than I am, and I’m not going to cross him if I don’t have really good reason.

But it does raise the question whether, in his understanding, a non-Christian is capable of love at all.

Now, there are lots of kind of love, according to Thomas; there is the kind of love I have for chocolate or garlic; there is the kind of love I have for my garden or my pet; there is the love I have for my friends, the love of my family, the love I feel toward a benefactor, the love I feel for my home or my country, the love I feel for my spouse, and so on. All of these are natural loves, and what they all have in common is that they guide us toward something good.

Love always recognizes the good, seeks the good, enjoys the good.

What sets Charity apart, for Thomas, is that it seeks and enjoys a good beyond our natural capacity: it loves God, and seeks eternal union with him.

This is a love so great that it is impossible to achieve by human will or effort. This kind of Charity is utterly impossible for a mere mortal; it can only come as a gift from God. That is why Charity is a theological virtue rather than a natural or moral virtue.

Really impossible?

Let’s try a thought experiment: imagine eternity. Unless you’re a high-falootin’ philosopher, you’re probably thinking of an endless extension of time. Now, imagine hanging out with your best friend or your deepest love for all eternity. No matter how lovable that person is, the fact is that at some point you’ll get a little bored, you’ll want some variety, you’ll grow tired of telling and hearing those same old stories over and over again.

In other words, even the sort of heaven that we can imagine – and the Catholic idea of heaven claims that it’s ultimately beyond our imagination – runs up against limits in our ability to recognize and enjoy the good things that we have.

For Thomas, Charity is a new ability: the ability to love infinitely, not bounded by the limits of our time or attention or emotions. It is an ability that reaches its perfection only in heaven; on earth we strive to grow in Charity, by what Thomas calls “earnest endeavor,” knowing we will only find its fulfillment beyond this life.

Gift and giver

Now, a Christian is someone who seeks this gift in Jesus Christ, believing and following and taking up his or her cross, and so on. But a gift is not something anyone can demand. If God is the giver, none of us can force his hand.

The Catholic teaching is that God gives Charity (among other gifts) in baptism. But God is not limited to our rituals; God can give his gifts, including the gift of Charity, well beyond the visible confines of the Church. This is not a perfect Charity, but only for the same reason that no Christian’s Charity is perfect in this life. This life is not for perfection; this life is for growth and “earnest endeavor.”

I don’t expect non-Christians to necessarily agree with this definition or line of argument; but I hope that I’ve been able to express what Thomas is saying with enough clarity that we can discuss (or debate) about it without misunderstanding each other.

Friendship is the language of love

The very first thing Thomas Aquinas says about the virtue of charity is that it is friendship.

Now, when I hear the word charity, “friendship” isn’t the synonym that leaps boldly to the front of my mind, ready to spring from the tip of my tongue. The first words that come to mind, if I’m in a good mood, are words like “altruism” or “benevolence;” if I’m in a less, well, charitable mood, words like “handout” come to mind.

If I’m thinking more philosophically, I might come up with words like “care” or “good will” or “love, in a rather specialized and technical sense.”

But friendship? Nah, that’s just too … too what? Too personal? Too practical? Too simple?

Aspects of friendship

When it comes right down to it, it’s almost as difficult to define friendship as it is to define love itself. But there are a few clear aspects of friendship that Thomas draws on when he explains why charity is friendship.

First, friendship requires a good will toward another. That is, we want what is good for a friend, regardless of whether we get anything out of it ourselves. As Thomas puts it: “For it would be absurd to speak of having friendship for wine or for a horse,” because these are things we use to fulfill our own desires, rather than doing good to the wine or the horse.

Next, friendship has to communicate. We can’t just claim a friendship with someone we don’t have any real connection to; rather, our friends are the ones we actually interact with. This may seem painfully obvious, but it’s foundational to the idea that charity – because it is friendship – can never be simply one-sided.

Finally, that communication has to be mutual. Thomas isn’t talking about some kind of tit-for-tat equality of exchange; he means that friends have to be able to share something in common, to communicate the same kind of thing to each other. In other words, the reason we use wine and horses to fulfill our own desires is exactly because the wine and the horse is incapable of receiving or responding to friendship as an equal. A relationship with wine or a horse is necessarily one-sided.

This is the kind of friendship that describes the virtue of charity.

Yeah, but…

What about when one person is a better friend than another? Where’s the “mutuality” in that?

And what about that Christian command to love your enemies? An enemy, by definition, isn’t going to be your friend!

The answer, I think, is as close as our ordinary way of talking about friendship: so-and-so is a better friend, or is my best friend, or is not a very close friend. Sometimes this is because of circumstance: it’s harder to be friends with someone across the country than with someone I see all the time. But it’s also because of a person’s ability to be a friend.

Charity is a virtue, after all. It’s both a gift we receive, and a skill we need to develop. So the more I practice desiring and seeking my friend’s good, the “better” a friend I will become.

As for enemies, if they absolutely refuse to reconcile and become friends, then Thomas notes that we love them because God loves them, and if we love God we love also whatever and whomever God loves. We don’t have to be buddy-buddy with them, but at least we should avoid getting in the way of them loving in whatever way they are able to. And we still can and should do our best to defend ourselves and others from their attacks: they will never grow in love if they succeed in their acts of hate.

No man is an island ... not even one as cool as this one

In a Church as big as the Catholic one, there are thousands of little corners of spirituality. A friend invited me to check one of them out, a group called Communion and Liberation, and basically they spent about an hour discussing the reflections of one of the group’s leaders.

The passage they read that evening concludes with the reflection that, we sometimes flee from reality because it is too overwhelming. It describes this as “loneliness, which is nothing but inability to face reality.”

Are we really supposed to face reality?

Now, there’s lots to argue with here, especially for a contrarian like myself. I mean, is this really the best definition of loneliness? But I have to admit that loneliness strikes me most when I’m feeling overwhelmed, like I just can’t face life anymore – at least, I can’t face it alone.

And it occurred to me that maybe, if human nature is inherently social, if I am really not fully human unless I’m engaged in relationship with other people, I’m not supposed to face reality alone. Maybe it’s just the way things are, maybe even the way things are supposed to be, that life is too big and too difficult and too confusing for me to deal with.

In other words, maybe my frustration, anger, fear, sadness, and loneliness come from a false assumption: that I’m supposed to be somehow entirely self-sufficient, that I’m somehow big enough to face reality on my own.

Facing reality with a friend

Now, I’ve been blessed with some of the finest friends in all of history. Not only do they put up with my endless noodling through abstract ideas and my needless nitpickiness about the exact etymological meaning of words, not only do they agree to see the tedious movies I want to watch and play the tedious games I want to play, not only do they eat my cooking with no greater objection than adding a bit of salt, but they constantly teach me new things about the world and how to live in it.

In fact, every time I’ve found myself really able to face some piece of reality that’s getting in my face, whether it’s a burnt piece of toast or the loss of a job or the prosecution of an unjust war, it’s only been because of a friend. Left to myself, I curl up into a ball in the darkest corner I can find. But with a friend by my side – or even on the long end of a phone line – I find a strength and a resilience that is greater than I possess in myself.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

It is not good for a man to be alone with a computer

Yesterday was my day off from Working for the Man this week. I slept in a bit, read some of my favorite blogs that I haven’t read for a while, watched some TV, and played a lot of those addicting online games – the stupid ones that aim as much at making you laugh or grossing you out as they do at challenging your skill.

Never mind that my room was a mess, and I had unopened mail piling up on my desk, and I had three different articles I wanted to write and/or research, and… you get the picture.

I didn’t shower till 4:45. Yeah, that’s P.M.

Stopping the vice of sloth

Call it laziness, call it procrastination, whatever you like. Among the seven deadly sins, it’s known as sloth or (for the etymologically minded) acedia. The closest twenty-first century word might be, depression. In any case, it’s the despair of anything in the world having value. And it gives rise either to doing nothing, (because nothing’s worth doing,) or compulsive activity, (because you’re distracting yourself from your fear of worthlessness.)

Anyway, I was supposed to go to a lecture on Greek culture last night with a friend (yes, I’m a nerd; get over it) but instead I asked her to come over and sit with me while I tried to get my life back on track.

It wasn’t until I had someone else there, someone to get me out of my head and the whole spiraling cycle of unanswered questions, that I was able to actually do anything.

Replacing vice with virtue

So what did I do? I mostly got my room cleaned.

Kind of an aside: I find my mental state often manifests itself in my physical state. If my thinking is muddy, I tend to let my room and general surroundings devolve into chaos. The external disorganization reinforces the internal messiness, and sometimes the best way to reset the mind is to reset my surroundings. That’s why I focused on cleaning my room.

I’m still behind on the unopened mail, but it’s within the realm of possibility now. By shifting from doing something bad to doing something good, I’ve taken a step in the right direction.

And that’s a step I couldn’t have taken without my friend’s help.

How a friend helps

My friend didn’t take much action. She helped me fold up my bedspread, and then sat and laughed at me while I scurried around my room throwing junk from one pile into another.

But she was there.

I’ve said many times that virtue is all about taking action appropriate to reality. In sloth, I was caught up in fantasy, an endless stream of “what if’s” and “why’s”. These are questions that can’t be answered by statements or by thoughts. They are questions that need to be answered by actions, by engaging the real world.

My friend, by being there, reminded me that there was a world beyond the confines of my skull. And that’s exactly what I needed yesterday.

So, Tammie, thank you very much!