What Love Requires

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Since my college days, I’ve been a fan of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. For those of you not familiar with him, Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who resisted the Nazis and paid for it with his life.

His decision to resist wasn’t easy. He labored over it, trying to decide between patriotism, and loyalty to his country’s government, and the demands of his conscience. Finally, it was a matter of deciding that his patriotism was really love of country and that the Nazis were destroying everything good about it.

He was also a pacifist, but decided that the Nazis, and their leader, Adolph Hitler, were such a threat to humankind – doing all they could to “liquidate” Jews, gypsies, disabled people, and everyone they considered undesirable – that he joined a secret group to assassinate Hitler. He was arrested and hanged by the Nazis in 1945 at age 39. His books, “Letters from Prison” and “The Cost of Discipleship” are classics.

Love the Standard

In last week’s blog about the noise in our lives, I mentioned that some of that “noise” may be from other people – maybe people who unwittingly disturb our peace and cause us anxiety. And in dealing with that, I mentioned that love is the standard and that we should ask ourselves regularly, “What does love require?”

It’s easy to be cynical about love. Many believe “making love” means only one thing. But, of course, for people searching for God and trying to do so by being more Godlike, all human interactions are a matter of making, or not making, love.

Just think about all the people in our lives who have “made love” to us, starting with our parents and siblings (in most cases). So many of them have come and gone.

Bonhoeffer
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I remember, for instance, an elderly lady who lived alone across the street from our house when I was a kid. I used to sit with her on her front porch and talk for hours. What about? I have no idea, but I felt her love and returned it. We both did what love requires.

Then there was Father Dominic Lavin, a Benedictine priest and native of Ireland who visited me in the hospital after I had my appendix removed. I was about 7 years old and when I was feeling particularly lonely in the hospital, he visited to cheer me up.

I remember him asking, “Wanna be my buddy?” (Unfortunately, in today’s world, some people may be suspicious of a priest asking such a question, but Father Dominic was above reproach and among the kindest men I’ve ever met.)

Years later, I was a freshman in college at the seminary run by the Benedictine Fathers of Father Dominic’s Abbey. He didn’t live at the abbey then, working mostly as a hospital chaplain. But he learned I was a student there and on one of his visits “home,” I ran into him on the campus. He recognized me and with his pixyish grin, asked, “Wanna be my buddy?”

Because he worked outside the abbey and died at a relatively young age, I saw very little of him after that, but I’ll always remember him as the model of kindness, in other words, as a model of a person who did what love requires.

Loving Mother

A few years ago, my wife, Amparo, and I were helping conduct a leadership session for Hispanic Catholics and a woman who was obviously a loving mother rose to say that her 17-year-old daughter wanted to leave home and live with her older boyfriend.

Not surprisingly, the mother opposed the plan and when she tried to provide her reasons, the daughter asked, “Don’t you want me to be happy?” The mother understood that for a teenager, the idea of “happiness” may not be the same as for adults. She was patient with her daughter but prevailed in opposition to her daughter’s plan, genuinely doing what love requires.  

Bonhoeffer had a painful choice, but in the end decided that love required him to act against the evil the Nazis embodied. Doing “what love requires” changes from person-to-person and from circumstance to circumstance, but in my view, it’s a requisite for people searching for God.