{"id":982,"date":"2015-08-12T05:33:29","date_gmt":"2015-08-12T05:33:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sjcmetheology.wpengine.com\/?p=982"},"modified":"2015-08-12T05:33:29","modified_gmt":"2015-08-12T05:33:29","slug":"whats-love-got-to-do-with-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/whats-love-got-to-do-with-it\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhat\u2019s love got to do with it?\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my own prayer this summer, I\u2019ve been using a collection of prayers from the great American Catholic writer, Flannery O\u2019Connor. The prayers were part of a journal that was recently found among her papers. They are the prayers of a young struggling writer who wants her faith to inform her writing and her writing to be a work of faith. The collection is called A Prayer Journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In one of the journal entries she is writing about the importance of a thread in writing a novel. The thread, she writes is \u201ca view of the world behind it & the most important single item under this view of [the] world is the conception of love—divine, natural, & perverted\u201d (O\u2019Connor 30). She continues to reflect on how many of our great writers, Freud, Proust, Lawrence \u201chave located love in the human & there is no need to question their location; however, there is no need either to define love as they do\u2014only as desire, since this precludes Divine Love, which while it too may be a desire, is a different kind of desire\u2014Divine desire\u2014and is outside of man and capable of lifting him up to itself\u201d (O\u2019Connor 30).<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor saw this way of defining love as primarily an emotion as a real problem for the modern heart, which was becoming increasingly \u201cdivorced from faith\u201d (O\u2019Connor 31). She writes \u201cThe modern man isolated from faith, from raising his desire for God into a conscious desire is sunk into the position of seeing physical love as an end in itself\u201d (O\u2019Connor, 31). This, though written more than 50 years ago, is at the heart of the debate today on the definition and meaning of marriage.<\/p>\n

\"Wedding-Feast-at-Cana1\"<\/a>Recently, I was asked to be part of a panel at the Catholic Information Center<\/a> reflecting on the impact of the Supreme Court\u2019s decision to legalize same-sex marriage. I was asked to address the theological and pastoral implications of the decision. One of the pastoral implications is both a challenge and an opportunity to give witness to that which makes a sacramental marriage different. I suggest what makes a sacramental marriage different is the way in which the Church understands love. As Flannery O\u2019Connor writes, the love we are called to share in marriage is a divine love. Married love is a self-sacrificing and self-giving imitation of Jesus\u2019 self-giving love. The married love of man and woman couple is a visible sign for the world of God\u2019s faithful and fruitful love.\u00a0What made this presentation so interesting was the centrality of defining what love means and what love has to do with marriage.<\/p>\n

Please follow this link<\/a> to view the complete presentation which includes President John Garvey of The Catholic University of America and Helen Alvar\u00e9, of George Mason University.<\/p>\n

Susan Timoney<\/strong>\u00a0is Secretary for Pastoral Ministry and Social Concerns for the Archdiocese of Washington and teaches spirituality for Saint Joseph\u2019s College Online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my own prayer this summer, I\u2019ve been using a collection of prayers from the great American Catholic writer, Flannery O\u2019Connor. The prayers were part of a journal that was recently found among her papers. They are the prayers of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,23,1],"tags":[165,170],"class_list":["post-982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-spirituality","category-uncategorized","tag-love","tag-marriage"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}