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Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT) Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Now that I have your attention, I want to talk about something almost completely different -- love. I wonder whether Pope Benedict XVI was tempted to start his recent -- and first -- encyclical that way. It was called "Deus Caritas Est," or "God Is Love" (http://tinyurl.com/dq3uj). The pope used it to say something useful about love at a time when the word means little more than sex. I admire his willingness to get a counter-cultural word edgewise into a maelstrom of words about the pleasures of the flesh, even if it's like trying to promote the value of silence at a NASCAR race. I found a point or two about the encyclical problematic, but Benedict was right to issue it and to suggest that love is much more profound and complicated than Hugh Hefner and his sordid legacy would have us believe. The pope, however, may be a voice crying in the wilderness. The pop culture may dismiss him as just a theologian worried that someone out there might be having fun. But the culture -- as well as adherents of religions beyond Catholic Christianity -- would do well to listen to his voice on this matter, even more than it listens to the editors of Cosmopolitan. In his new letter to his church, Benedict draws some distinctions among various kinds of love. Because so much of the classic thinking about this comes to us from Greek culture, it's not surprising that Greek words are attached to these various shades of love -- eros (romantic), agape (self-giving) and so on. By acknowledging the existence of different kinds of love, we inevitably are faced with difficult questions. Among them: Can we call it love to have casual sex with someone we barely know? Can we love someone deeply without some kind of physical intimacy? What does erotic, physical love have to do with what religion wants to say to us about the love of God? The pope struggles with all of this in his encyclical -- not in the way Oprah or Jerry Springer might ask the questions, of course, but in a foot-noted, nuanced, at-times stodgy way. And yet the questions he raises about love and its nature are, if you ask me, much more eternally important than whether abortion should be legal or whether women should be priests. That's because if we don't get love right, we won't get anything right. Speaking from the position of a man who understands that his job is to speak on behalf of God, Benedict says God lavishes love on humanity and that people, in turn, must share love with others. He rejects the idea that Christianity has been puritanical about the way it views romantic, physical, passionate love. Rather, he says, that kind of love is ordained by God but it "needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure." I know there will be people who insist that a celibate man who leads a celibate male priesthood can have nothing useful to say about the kind of love that gets expressed in sexual acts. But that's a short-sighted view. After all, most people who write novels or academic studies about murder have never committed the act, and yet can offer many good insights. Besides, the pope insists that whatever erotic love is, it is less than a full expression of love if it is not combined with love that "becomes concern and care for others." When that happens, he writes, "no longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice." What can that possibly mean? Well, it means, among other things, thinking first about the needs of your spouse and children before you insist on satisfying all of your own desires. It means being willing to care for sick parents in their old age without resentment. It means sacrificing material pleasures today so you can afford to educate your children tomorrow. But it goes beyond the personal, too. It means caring for the Earth, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, comforting the afflicted. In his book "Constantine's Sword," James Carroll calls love "that most banalized and inflated word." The pope has tried to refill the word with eternal meaning. And I say good for him. ___ ABOUT THE WRITER Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to him at: The Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or e-mail him at tammeus@kcstar.com. Visit Tammeus' Web log at http://billtammeus.typepad.com ___ Have a comment? Please e-mail us. ©The Voice 2006 Revised 09/17/2007 02:07:25 PM— http://www.uamont.edu/Organizations/TheVoice/3_17/love.htm |
