The Wound of Love
by David Morrison

“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete. This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

-John 15:11-12

     To plum the depths of God’s love is to become immersed in the absolute paradox of suffering and joy. The joy of being loved by God and loving one another is insurmountable. Yet, it’s precisely this pleasure that ultimately leads us into and through overwhelming sorrows and back again to indescribable delight. In short, to experience God is to bear the living wound of love. In his novel, Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk has his protagonist utter this stark and fundamental reality: “It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.” The love that God is, in essence, which Jesus demonstrated on the cross, cannot be relegated to the sentimentality of greeting cards and bumper stickers. It is a severe mercy. Forever, the Father empties himself into the Son who returns this cycle of self-emptying; and the Spirit in unison with the Father and the Son, perpetually pours outward: all as love. It’s only in the experience of dying to ourselves for the sake of others that we know the true heart of love. The wound of love takes us on a journey into the desert of self-vacating. Madeleine L’Engle, in her poetry book, Lines Scribbled on an Envelope, wrote:

            To learn to love
            is to be stripped of all love
            until you are wholly without love
            because
            until you have gone
            naked and afraid
            into this cold dark place
            where all love is taken from you
            you will not know
            that you are wholly within love.

     If we are to “love one another, as Jesus has loved us,” we cannot wait for the theoretical and romantic opportunity (which will never come) to literally and physically “lay our lives down for our friends.” This “laying down” is a daily spiritual reality of detaching our over-identification with our possessions, positions, and power so that we can be intentionally present to those around us. It’s only in this authentic dying that we come to unconditional and earnest love.

_____________________

“Pierce, O most sweet Lord Jesus, my inmost soul with the most joyous and healthful wound of Thy love, and with true, calm and most holy apostolic charity, that my soul may ever languish and melt with entire love and longing for Thee, may yearn for Thee and for thy courts, may long to be dissolved and to be with Thee.”

-St. Bonaventure

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