The assent of love

The fundamental vocation of every human person directs men and women to seek God, to know him and to love him with all their strength.

Inspired and called by Jesus Christ, His Son, the entire faithful are to hand on from generation to generation to God’s invitation for us to participate in His divine life.  We accomplish this by professing the faith by which we know Him, by living it through fraternal sharing, and by celebrating it in liturgy and prayer. (CCC 1, 3)  The real question for us is how do we come to understand this and live it out in practical terms?

We begin by recognizing that all of creation flows out of love and into love.

We are brought into being by the love of God and His desire to share His love. He breathes life into us through the Spirit of love, the Holy Spirit. This breath of life instills in us His image and likeness. Through this gift we are called to live in a manner that reflects God’s inner life as three persons in one Godhead. This is a life of communal love, a life of relationship.  For this reason we exist only to love and to do so in communion with others.  

How we go about doing this depends upon God’s will for each one of us.  Because we are created in love and for love, God’s will for us, can only be love.  It is not something we can seek to gain; rather, it is God’s free gift of relationship in His love.  This will of God is a freedom embedded deep within the human heart, it is a freedom for love, and it is only within this freedom that we can discover the giftedness of our humanity.

This freedom allows us to become the human person God created us to be.  It is for this purpose that the human heart longs for love and seeks to find it in the experiences of life.  All too often we allow ourselves to be misguided in our seeking for love.  If we are to discover who and what God created us to be, we must seek to discern the particular expression of love He has for us as individuals.

The secret of our life and identity as individuals lies in God.  The love by which He brought us into existence contains the very secret of our identity and the reason for which we exist.  To begin with, we must learn to love ourselves, not with a selfish or disordered self-love, but with the love of self as God created us to be.

The problem is that we cannot find our true self because we want to be something other than what God created us to be.  We might feel the need to be a particular way so others will find us more attractive or desirable for friendship.  We seek to obtain material things believing that they will bring us joy or happiness by relieving us of stress or work.  

Part of discovering who God created us to be is to find where our talents and natural abilities lie.  This knowledge leads us to the vocation God desires for us to enable us to live out and express the love He has given us.

Vocation is defined as a divine call to God’s service or to the Christian life, and in a particular way, a call by God to a function or station in life, such as the religious or priestly vocation, or the vocation of marriage.

The vocation to marriage calls individuals to enter into a sacramental relationship with one another and God.  It is a calling that brings men and women together in a manner that befits the dignity of their complementary natures.  From the beginning of society, man and woman have come together to receive the nuptial blessing given to them by God.

Before couples express their marriage vows in the rite of matrimony, the priest or deacon asks them to state their intentions by answering three questions.  “Have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?  Will you love and honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?  Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and His Church?”

The answers to these questions form the basis of the individuals’ consent as a couple and therefore the basis of their marriage.  Without this consent, there can be no assent, no yes to love.

In response to the question of how they met and what brought them together, couples often express how they fell in love.  This in itself presents a subtle distortion of the nature of love, because love demands a rising above oneself for the good of the beloved.  In the New American Bible, chapter three of Genesis is titled “The Fall of Man.”  We commonly refer to it as the fall from grace or man’s fall into original sin.  If we fall into sin, how can we realistically expect to “fall in love?”  Falling is a lowering of the ideal to which we are called to live; rising elevates us to something beyond ourselves.  

There is an ascent necessary to truly love.

St. Bonaventure tells us that, “No one can be happy unless he or she rises above oneself by an ascent (a rising) of the heart.  But we cannot rise above ourselves unless a higher power lifts us up.”  That higher power is God’s love, and prayer is the source of the ascent of love.  
If we desire happiness we must seek the will of God, and we must be willing to give our assent, our yes to His will.  It is only there that we can discover true love and from it, true happiness.  

The human person, in its fullest expression, finds his or her fulfillment in doing the will of God, in living the vocation to which they are called in response to God’s call of love.  Unless we give our yes, our assent to love, we can never ascend the heights to which God calls us, the heights of love.  Therefore, let us seek our ascent to love through the giving of our assent to love.