He Won't Relent

The other day I got to be present at the celebration of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony uniting two dear friends, surrounded by many of my other dearest friends in the world. It's quite an experience, really; for a weekend, every couple of months or so (more often in the summer, because wedding season) a whole bunch of crazy recent college grads descend upon a city, have a blast with one another for like 3 days, and then go back to life. We celebrate, we catch up, we pray, and then we head back. It's incredible.

I could keep writing about how awesome it is, but none of you really wants to hear that. What I want to reflect on briefly is a line of a song that we sang at this wedding in a time of praise after communion which wrecked me (read: I cried). After communion, the musicians led us in a time of praise that was one of the more powerful moments I have ever been a part of, as the Bride and Groom praised the God who they had just received and who had just united them in this great Sacrament, and their family and friends joined them in this time of praise and thanksgiving. The verse to the song that we were all singing together, a song called "You Won't Relent," goes like this:

"I set you as a seal, upon my heart, as a seal upon my arm. For there is love, that is as strong as death, jealousy demanding as the grave. And many waters, cannot quench this love." 

This verse, coming from Scripture (Songs 8:6), is what got me so emotional. As I was in this place, surrounded by so many of the people I love, worshiping the God who had just humbled Himself to be received in flesh and blood, there was no doubt in my mind that there is a God who loves so deeply and intensely that it can only be described as a love so jealous and demanding as to only be compared to the grave, and yet is stronger than the grave.

Think of that line. The love of God is not just simply a nice, fluffy love. This is not a love which is just kind, and caring. It's not a love that it just a kind sentiment or a nice word. No, this love is SO MUCH more. This love is so jealous, so demanding, so unquenchable that it took on the grave and it won. This is a love that is as strong as death, but more than that-it's STRONGER. This love didn't just take on the grave, it won. And after winning that victory, this God has continued to come after His beloved. He will never stop searching out the ones He loves simply because He loves us.

The refrain of that song says "You won't relent until you have it all, my heart is yours." His love won't stop, He won't stop, until He has my whole heart. As I prayed in that Church, I knew this to be true. Even when life isn't perfect, I can never lose sight of the fact that His love is stronger than death, that His love will continue to come after me and seek me out in all of my imperfection and brokenness, His love will not abandon or betray me but will come after me with a jealousy as demanding as the grave, defeating death so as to give me new life.

What a gift.

Dive In; Those Glorious Nuptials

Recently I was at a wonderful, beautiful wedding with some of the people I find most dear in the world. You, our dear readers, might recognize the groom as the one who writes some of these posts. This wedding week and weekend was filled with everything you'd want: sunshine, friends, good food, great conversations, classic jokes, reunions of people who'd been apart for far too long, and everything else you might think of when you think of a wedding. 

Read the rest of this post!

I am writing this summer for Lighthouse Catholic Media's Youth Department as a part of a Summer Project called Dive In, where we will be discussing various ways to actively grow in the faith over the summer instead of burning out or just going through the motions. Subscribe over at lighthousecatholicyouth.com to get updates everytime a new one of these posts goes up!

Note: This post originally went up on Lighthouse Catholic Media over 1 week ago, but I have been out of town and hadn't had a chance to link to it on here! 

Love You Deserve

From the resounding choruses of popular music to the story lines of nearly every movie to the theme of basically every single post on Facebook or twitter (or Linkedin or Google+, if you're cool like that), we are surrounded in today's world by a fury of thoughts on love. Love, we are told, is what it's all about-and we are fools if we try to say otherwise.

No, but really, it is all about love. The world we live in is in seemingly constant chaos, and the only way to navigate through is to keep pushing on by giving and receiving love in whatever way we are able on a daily basis. This thought, which is so central to the thinking in today's world, is in many ways good. And in others it is the main thing keeping us from living the way that we should.

Here is the problem: we have taken love from the most wonderful thing in the world, a thing which is about sacrifice and giving completely of oneself in order to allow the beloved to reach their fullest potential and have joy for all of eternity and reduced it to seeking pleasure. Instead of love dying on a cross, we look for love which makes me happy. Instead of a love which says "not my will but Yours," we look for a love which says, "whatever common ground we can find to give us both immediate satisfaction, let's take that." Amid all of this, then, the Catholic Church and anyone who says that love is about self-sacrifice and not self-gratification are seen as the enemies, pointing us away from the here and now and towards eternity, which of course is scary and not to be talked about (read Bad Catholic's wonderful explanation of this here: Popular Music as a Nauseating, No Good, Very Bad Attempt at Propping Up a False Sense of Eternity (With Goats)).

Let me try and explain in a language we all understand a little bit more than my incoherent ramblings: movies.

Recently I watched the movie "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." The main theme of this story, I think, is one that the teacher played by Paul Rudd (who somehow has appeared in 97.9% (ish) of every movie made in the last 5 years (that number might be made up)) explains to the main character when he says that, as human beings, "we accept the love we think we deserve." I think that there is so much truth to this it is silly. We tend to have a hard time falling in love with or letting ourselves be loved by the God of the universe because we see ourselves as broken and sinful and can't imagine the All-Powerful God loving us; we don't want to accept a spouse who will love us unconditionally and sacrificially because we see ourselves as being conditional and selfish beings, and so on. In that sense, I think that the Perks of Being a Wallflower and author Stephen Chbosky are right on.

The problem I see, though, is with how the characters play out this search love. For Charlie, the main character, his experience of seeking after the love he deserves and the love those around him deserve is distorted in the way that early adolescence tends to distort things in our human minds. More than adolescence, though, his searching for love is distorted by the thing that seems so prominent in today's culture that it is almost unavoidable: love is about the satisfaction in the here and now. [There might be some spoilers here] For Charlie, this encounter and searching for love is about the here and now. From making new friends to taking drugs and ultimately to a "beautiful" one-night stand with the girl he loves (I put beautiful in quotes to make you realize that I don't think it is beautiful, I think the book and movie attempt to show it this way). This story, supposed to be the coming of age story of a generation, shows the major problem that we have with love (and that I think Marc at Bad Catholic pointed out in that article I linked to above), which is that in our search for something so eternal as love we settle on the temporal. We seek pleasure as our means to self-satisfaction, when really it is simply a mind-numbing technique to help us not think about the fact that we are seeking self-interest, which is actually contrary to love.

So, here is my point: when you really want to seek love, don't seek yourself. Don't seek pleasure. Don't seek momentary experiences. Seek the other. Seek self-sacrifice. Instead of trying to feel infinite for a moment, seek a relationship with Him who is infinite, Him who is eternal, Him who will never stop running after you.

It might be hard, but it'll be worth it. It will be worth it because when you seek after the eternal God, you will find yourself not wallowing in self-pity and a desire to make yourself happy, but a relationship with the God who will never leave you broken, but rather will always search for you in love, hoping to show you how to respond to Him and to be with Him for all of eternity.

When you seek yourself, that's what you'll get; when you seek true love by giving yourself away, you'll find the God of the universe, and He'll give you way more than some one-night stand can give you.

"Dear young people, the happiness you are seeking, the happiness you have a right to enjoy has a name and a face: it is Jesus of Nazareth, hidden in the Eucharist. Only he gives the fullness of life to humanity! With Mary, say your own "yes" to God, for he wishes to give himself to you." -Pope Benedict XVI

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