Jana’s Reviews > Love's Sacred Order: The Four Loves Revisited > Status Update

Jesus Christ should be all things to us--Brother, Friend, Lover, and Lord God--and the the proper object of all four loves.

But to the frigid soul, all love is rape.

The lover's intense, self-forgetting concentration on the beloved reveals many things about him, beyond just the reality of desire. It reveals a dire need, the need for another, and as such it reveals the poverty and shabbiness of human existence without love.

Far from being an afterthought, the creation of Eve after the whole world was functionally in place signifies that companionship of friends and their mutual enjoyment of their friendship exists outside of all functionality as an end in itself, it a reflection of the very life of the Blessed Trinity.

Could it be that, as an antidote to this state in society, the person vowed to the contemplative life (vowed, that is, to rediscovering our humanity as God intended it) must in our day dedicate himself to the cultivation of authentic friendship as part of the mission to partake in Christ's redemption of the world?

"While gift-love may be hieratic ally higher than need-love, nevertheless need-love is not synonymous with selfishness and therefore unworthy of the mature person. In fact, Lewis says, to pretend that I can ever be wholly beyond need-love may just be the highest form of arrogance, because then I would think myself too great and accomplished to 'cry out to God' [--or anyone else--] from my poverty."

"To be fully human is in a real sense, it seems to me, synonymous with loving well."