3 1 John 4:20.
4 1 John 4:16.
5 Matt. 18:20.
6 Luke 18:11.
7 See 2 Cor. 5:17.
8 Luke 10:27.
9 Rom. 6:4; See also Col. 2:12.
10 Mark 8:35.
III43
HEREIN IS LOVE
“Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and
he who loves is born of God and knows God.”—1 John 4:7
Thus far, we have identified the Christian life as participation in the life of Christ, and the Christian fellowship as the relationship of men who have been reunited to one another by the presence in them of the Spirit of Christ. We need to make this concept even more specific and, therefore, now ask the question: “How does one participate in the life of Christ; how does one find the Spirit; what must one do?” The gospel’s answer is: “You shall love.”11 It has surpassing attraction, but is also considerably disappointing. Love is appealing, but its practice is appallingly difficult. While the Christian relationship seems to promise a difference, it is hard to identify. What makes the difference? or, What is the Good News?
The Gift of God in Christ
Christians believe that the gift of God in Christ confers something that man needs but has lost. What is it that we do not have that we are supposed to receive as a result of our new relationship with Christ? Let us recall that in our earlier discussion we took note of the ambivalent character of love. We want to be loved and we are afraid to accept love; we want to love and are afraid to give love for fear it will not be accepted. We are not free to love, therefore; that which by nature we cannot have is the freedom to love. We believe that God is love. Creation is the work of His love, and love is the work of His44 creation. But the ambivalences of human nature keep us from being free in the work of love. The coming of Christ, in the midst of history, changed the balance of power between love and hate, life and death, and set us free to love. Love became the energizing, reconciling force in human existence. B.C. and A.D. marked the transition, not only of time, but also of the old creation in which our power of love was imprisoned in our fear to love, and of the new creation in which our power of love was set free by the love of God in Christ. Now the triumphant power of God’s love is at work in the world and is available to all who seek to do the work of love anywhere and for anyone. Accordingly, the work of love was and is the breaking down of walls of separation, and the reuniting of man and God, man and man, and man with himself, in all which work we participate.
What Is Love?
Do we know what we mean when we think of love in this way? A clear understanding of love is needed, because it is so gravely misunderstood in our time. All too commonly, love is regarded as a sentiment, a feeling, a “liking” for someone. While sentiment and emotion are certainly a part of love, it is tragic to make them synonymous with love. Certainly we mean more than that when we say, “God is love,” or when we wrestle with the concept of man showing his love of God through his love for his neighbor. In these concepts we are thinking of love as the moving, creating, healing power of life; of love that is “the moving power of everything toward everything else that is.”12 Love reunites life with life, person with person, and as such is not easily discouraged. The most dramatic symbol of love’s courage and triumph is, as we have seen, the cross and the resurrection; it stands for the love wherewith God has loved us. “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us….”13 Having given45 us His love, we have it for our response to Him, so that we love Him by loving one another with His love which we received through His people. Thus, the nurturing of our response to God’s love is the work of the church. Our responsibility is to love Him. We are to love God by loving one another, and in loving one another we introduce one another to God. This is the work of the church and the vocation of the people of God. We are called to love one another reunitingly with the love wherewith God loved us.
In order for us to participate in the love of God which is at work in the world, we need to understand ourselves and our own creaturely problems in relation to love. Too much Christian thought about love and its work is abstract rather than a reckoning with the complications of human existence. In order to avoid this danger, let us turn to a consideration of what is involved in recovering our freedom to love.
Recovering Our Freedom to Love
Because we are created in the image of God, our deepest need is to be loved. This need is fundamental and has both human and divine roots. The baby comes into being as a result of being loved. We take him in our arms, care for him, call him by name, and reveal to him the love that we have for him. Thus he experiences love. These experiences of love stimulate, in turn, his love, which is the completion of his need of love. His response to being loved is to love, and this response is not long in coming. We see it in his smiles, in his cooing, when he pats his mother’s cheek, when he puts his little arms around her neck, and later when he begins to toddle and bring his gifts to her. In many ways the individual begins to show that he has been loved by revealing his growing power to love.
Our day, however, seems to be one in which people are more conscious of their need to be loved than of their need to love, with the result that everyone is running around looking for love. But we do not find love by looking for it; we find it by giving it.46 And when we find love by loving, we find God. Our Lord gave us His love generously, not in order that we might be loved, but that we might be freed to love one another. “You received without pay, give without pay.”14 He calls us from our childish preoccupations with security to the appropriate adult occupations of the mature Christian. He calls us away from our suckling tendencies to our responsibility to feed others, from receiving to giving. If someone came to me and asked, “How can I find God?” I would answer, “Go find someone to love and you’ll find Him.”
Unless the searcher was love-deprived and in need of reassurance, I would not begin by figuratively putting my arm around him and cherishing him. There are situations where this is necessary. People can be so broken and so hurt that they cannot love, and they need to be cherished and reassured until they can. One of the responsibilities of the church is to be on the alert for those people who in later life need the love and reassurance they should have had when they were younger. Unfortunately, however, many of us are embarrassed when we are confronted by emotionally needy persons. We may resent their need and the demand which it makes on us, with the result that they may never know the love of man and God, and may never be brought to the point where they may participate in the life and work of Christ which is, as we have seen, to love.
Of course, it is not easy to love, especially when we feel unequal to it, are tempted to regress, and want to be loved and cuddled ourselves. Yet even then the answer to our need is to love. Many of us have had experiences that have borne out this truth. Once when my son and I had had a quarrel in which I had lost my temper, and was feeling discouraged as a father and not at all competent where human relations were concerned, the phone rang and a young couple asked if they might come and talk with me about the difficulty they were having with their young son. Because of my feelings of wretched inadequacy, my47 inclination was to say “No,” but they were so obviously in need of help and so importunate that I arranged for them to come to see me immediately. I had no confidence in being able to help them, but I did try to listen to them. As I listened, I participated in their thinking about their own situation. When the session was over, they thanked me enthusiastically for my help. After they were gone, I realised that however much I had helped them, I myself had been helped. By accepting my responsibilities as a counselor and by listening to them, I was loving them; and because I loved them, I had the experience of being loved. The relationship in which our love is needed may offer little apparent encouragement, but once we give ourselves, the resources for the work of love become available.
It is, therefore, as important for us to love as it is for us to be loved, and our need to love is as great as the need to be loved. If we are not able to love, life is as deficient as it would have been if we had not been loved. We must not assume that because we have been loved we shall automatically become a person who loves. Human beings do not develop that automatically. Certainly the experience of being loved prepares us to love, but we can misuse the gifts of love. We may decide to appropriate them for ourselves. We may not want to assume responsibility for others. But having received love and choosing not to love, we may lose such love as we have. We then become self-centered and selfish misers of love, and therefore loveless.
How can we love our children so that they will become givers of love rather than hoarders of it? How can the freedom and power to love be released in them? The answer is, by encouraging their love responses. We have already recognized the importance, first, of the need to be loved, and second, of the need to love. We now face the importance of our being able to accept love and of encouraging the attempts of people, and especially of our children, to express their love. We might assume that it is easy to welcome their responses. Unfortunately, our expressions of love do not always please those to whom we make them.48 Because our love offerings are not appreciated and accepted, we may feel unloved and rejected. After repeated attempts to express our love successfully, and having been repeatedly rejected and discouraged, we may give up and turn our love in on ourselves.
A rose gardener told me of an instance that illustrates how difficult it is to accept some love offerings. He not only grew roses, but exhibited them as well. On one occasion, he had several blooms that he was nurturing for a coming show, one of which was being produced on a bush of his favorite variety. On the day before the exhibit his four-year-old son appeared before him with ecstatic face and with his prize rose clutched stemless in his hand, saying, “Look Daddy, what I brought you.” It was obvious that the youngster, who adored his father, thought that he was presenting the perfect gift of his love, because he knew how much his father liked that particular rose. The father, on the other hand, confessed that he responded as the rose grower and exhibitor, rather than as one who had an opportunity to encourage his son’s love responses by recognizing, from his son’s point of view, the appropriateness of the gift. When, therefore, he very understandably scolded and spanked his child for picking the rose, the little boy was dreadfully upset. Episodes of this kind, if only occasional, are not serious, because they are experienced in the context of a relationship that is predominantly loving, supportive, and encouraging.
When the expressions of love and affection of children are not received with understanding and acceptance, their attempts to learn to love find no encouragement. Because they are being prevented from learning to love their parents and others, they are being prevented also from learning to love God in and through them. Our Lord’s response to the gifts brought to Him demonstrates the kind of responses we should make to one another. Even when people’s gifts were poorly motivated and ill-chosen, He was able to look behind them and see and understand the person who gave. Although Zacchaeus seemed to be motivated only by curiosity, our Lord invited him to come down out of the49 tree and asked that He might have dinner with him, thus moving behind the greed that had made Zacchaeus a publican.15 And because our Lord was able to accept the gift of Mary Magdalene, her true love was called forth.16 So it is with us. Our offerings often are pitiful and ill-chosen, but He looks upon the heart and sees there that really we are trying to express our love despite our ill-chosen means of doing so.
If we are to participate in the life of Christ and be the instruments of His love, we must learn to be hospitable to one another’s efforts to express love. Parents need to look upon the hearts of their children and see deeply what they are trying to express. Husbands and wives likewise need to look behind the externals of behavior. What we do on the outside often fails to represent truly and adequately what is on the inside. We all need encouragement to love, and hospitality toward human attempts to express love is one of the surest ways in which we can participate in the contemporary living of Christ in the world.
Some Disciplines of Love
Now there are some disciplines that we need to follow as we engage in the dialogue of love. First, there is the discipline of giving oneself. It is the discipline of keeping oneself responsible for and to one another, responsible in facing issues and in making decisions. The only way to love is to communicate love by word and action. We may learn to use our power of being to speak and act the word of love. We should refuse to withhold it for any reason, including our fear of speaking it. Of course, there is risk in giving ourselves. Our gift of love may not be accepted, may not be appreciated, and may even be exploited. In giving love we may be hurt because of the nature of others’ responses. But we will be stronger for having given it, and others may be called forth by it. Life cannot remain the same when love has been expressed.50
Second, there is the discipline of holding ourselves to our own part. This is the discipline of allowing others to speak for themselves; or again, the discipline of refraining from trying to carry on both sides of a dialogue. We are always doing this; that is, we speak to the image we have of the other person. We try to anticipate his response and take away his freedom to respond and speak for himself. We choose our part of the dialogue in response to what we think his reaction will be and thereby rob ourselves of our freedom to be. There can be no communication between the images which two people hold of each other. Communication is possible only between two persons who, out of mutual respect, really address one another.
A third discipline is to accept the demand in love and our obligation to meet that demand. The compulsive element in love is hard for us to accept. But we cannot separate law from love. Law is implicit in love. Our Lord, Who is the incarnation of divine love, warned that He would not remove one bit of the law. He did not destroy the law, but by His love fulfilled it. It is really good that law is a part of love. Our own love relationships benefit from the presence of law in love, because law guides and protects our relationship. When we are “in love,” or in union with one another, we are not conscious of the law, but it is implicitly present. We can be said to be “living above the law.”
The law that is implicit in the relationship between a man and a woman who love each other is that they shall respect and act trustworthily in relation to one another; that they shall care for one another in all the ways that are necessary to their relationship. As long as love prevails, they are not conscious of this law. They do not need it. But if for any reason they should “fall out of” love, then they become conscious of their obligations to each other. Their relationship is now lived under the burden of law, and they will find it harder to observe than they did before. They now are being held together by their obligations, and it may be that while being thus held together they will again find each other in love. When they look back on this period some years51 later, they may call the whole experience love, because then they will see that the obligations of their relationship are a part of their love. Obviously, this is mature and not infantile love. Love that accepts responsibility and its obligations is love that is not primarily concerned about its privileges, although it gives thanks for whatever privileges it has. It recognizes itself not primarily as an emotion, but as a way of life; and it is more concerned about commitment than sensation.
By the employment of these principles that we have just rehearsed, we can help our children grow in their capacity to love and thereby become more capable of a heroic commitment to one another. This kind of commitment should characterize the members of the Christian fellowship, the men and women in whose lives the Spirit of the Christ is incarnate.
We have seen that we need to be loved in order that we may love others and that we should encourage one another’s love responses. Does this mean that our attempts to express love should be accepted without correction? What should the rose-growing father of the little boy have done? One view is that the father should have accepted the gift with thanks, recognizing only the child’s intention. Certainly, his intentions should be honored and his gift accepted. But the boy also needed help in learning how to express his love to others. Here is something we are always having to learn. All of us have had the experience of doing or giving something that was intended to be an expression of our love, only to discover that the gift was not appreciated by the one to whom it was given, and we find ourselves saying, “Oh, I didn’t mean it to be that way.” With children and with one another we need to strike a balance between acceptance of the intention and guidance in choosing the means for the expression of love. Loving is an art, and we all need to learn the art and to refine its practice. One would expect Christians and church people, who are supposed to be incarnations of the spirit of love, to be masters of the art. Yet, to the world, we often appear to be ungracious people. So let us learn to love one another, and let52 us train our children in the practice of the art of love, by encouraging and disciplining them in it.
If a text for this responsibility were needed, we might take it from the ancient liturgical language of the church in which we say, “We receive this person into the congregation of Christ’s flock,” which should mean that we receive the person into the congregation of persons in whom the love of Christ is incarnate.
The Language of Words and Life
Unfortunately, however, we often use the words that suggest the right meaning but fail to carry out that meaning in our lives. All too easily our religious statements become empty forms, separated from the vitality and meaning which they are supposed to express. Remember, for instance, how vainly we sometimes say the Lord’s Prayer, which is a form that our Lord gave us, by means of which we could express the vitality of our relationship with God and one another. Likewise, we can honor and use the correct verbal and other symbols about the church and Christian fellowship, its rites and ceremonies, and yet fail to translate them into action, with the result that our rites and ceremonies and doctrinal statements become dry, empty forms. Instead of being the means of new life, they may only disappoint people, because they do not really communicate the meaning that they seem to promise. Every church should always test whether its forms are really expressive of the truth which it professes. It is not enough that we speak the truth; we must live it.
It has been given to men to communicate both by word and by the life that is lived. There must always be a vital relation between the meaning that is being communicated in the word and the form or means of its communication. The breakdown of education and of religion occurs when there is a breakdown between the human experience with its meaning and the word which represents it. This breakdown is complete when speaking the word becomes a substitute for living its meaning. This breakdown also occurs when a culture undertakes to educate by means53 of words and concepts only, and neglects to employ what happens between man and man as an integral and indispensable part of the curriculum.
The word and the meaning of the experience belong to each other and need each other, and the relation between them is a necessary part of education. Let us use the word “fight” as an illustration. We have this word because of man’s experience in fighting. Out of the relationships of conflict and combat comes the experience we think of as fighting, and the word “fight” stands for it. The very young child learns to fight before he learns the word “fight.” So far as he knows, the experience of fighting exists only between himself and his mother, and it is necessary for him to discover that fighting is a universal human activity. He learns the meaning of the word “fight” by the meanings that he brings out of his own combat, and on the basis of these he begins to understand the universal meaning of “fight.” The word thus unites his little, individual experience with the experience of the human race of which he is a part. Therefore the word becomes an effective instrument in teaching him the meaning of his experience in the context of the experience of his own kind.
Similarly, because of his relationship to his mother, the child may experience her trustworthiness long before he knows the word “trust,” but he needs a word for this experience. Then, as he begins to acquire the ability to convey these meanings with words, he learns the word “trust” and immediately the door opens so that his experience becomes related to the much larger experience of the people that have lived before him. If a child is being brought up in the Christian fellowship, the minute he begins to have a word to describe the trustworthiness of his relationship with his mother, he also begins to understand the meaning of trust as Christians have experienced it in relation to God.
On the other hand, it is difficult to convey the meaning of Christ’s death to a child. Here the words are crucial to the understanding of the meaning, but he cannot bring out of his own life sufficient experiences to make the meaning of the concept available54 to him. But it is important to introduce him to these concepts by means of words against the time when the words will carry meaning. As we live with our children we help them interpret the meaning of their experiences. Some day they will be able to move from the little meanings that they have accumulated about life and death to the great meanings of the life and death and resurrection of Christ by means of the little word “cross” and other associated words. Education requires the use of both the language of words and the language of relationships. We teach children the words of our faith, but at the same time we try to live with them in ways that will provide the meanings that will prepare them for understanding the meanings of the faith. And this is what I mean when I suggest that what happens between us is an indispensable part of the curriculum.
The Curriculum of Relationship
This emphasis upon the relationship between parent and child, between teacher and pupil, between person and person, as a part of the learning situation, seems to put a heavy burden upon the teacher. After all, it was difficult enough when the teacher had to be responsible for the correct words for the transmission of the truth, and for the understandings that must go with them. Now, in addition, we have to pay attention to what is going on between teacher and pupil. The work of teaching is much bigger than mere verbal transmission, and nothing less is worthy of being called Christian teaching.
This kind of teaching requires that the truth being taught be incarnate in the relationship between men, which was what God did in Christ. The teaching of Christ is contained not only in His words, but also in His life. His life gave meaning to His words and made them uniquely different from any other words that had ever been spoken. Actually, many of the things that our Lord taught were not new, but His life was, and this made His teaching unique. The same principle must apply to us. Some instruction given in the name of Christian education is dull,55 monotonous, and irrelevant. There is nothing untrue about it, but it is taught without the conviction born of experience, and it is not expressed in what goes on between man and man. On the other hand, a recognition of the responsibilities of this kind of teaching should be coupled with the joys and satisfactions of it. It is the kind of teaching that can relieve us of some of the anxieties of accomplishment.
A Word of Encouragement
Many parents and teachers are concerned about the quality of the care and teaching which they give children, and they are particularly worried about their failures and sins in relation to them. Present in many of us is the fear that we may have permanently impaired the future welfare of those for whom we are responsible. This leads us to try to be perfect in the discharge of our duties and thus prevent serious injury to our children. In other words, we would like to love them perfectly, which, if we were able to do, would ill prepare them for their life in this world.
Furthermore, and more importantly, implicit in this anxiety is a grave misconception of what it means to be a Christian. The test of our love and faith is not the absence of failure and sin and problems, but lies in what we are able to do about them. Of course, Christian parents get angry with their children and say and do things that hurt them. We are haunted by the signs in our children that we have failed them, by the evidences of their anxiety, by the problems they sometimes have in relation to other people, by their lying and stealing, by their hostility and quarrelsomeness, and by their excessive competitiveness and jealousy. Sometimes the scenes around the family table are far different from our image of what Christian family life and fellowship should be. We wonder where we have failed, grow discouraged, and fail again. We are embarrassed by the contradiction that our children see between the things that we say and the things that we do.
Parents and teachers who, like Mrs. Strait, live by the law,56 either have to blind themselves to what’s going on in their relationships or else become profoundly discouraged. And if we are like Mr. Churchill, our decision will be to ignore human problems and to turn ourselves to a devotion of God, as if that were possible! Dr. Manby would wait for time to take care of the matter, and Mr. Knowles would frantically cram more knowledge about the Bible into the minds of parents and children in the hope that, somehow or other, knowing about God and Christian teaching would produce the necessary changes. Mr. Clarke, of course, would turn the whole “mess” over to the clergy.
Implicit in the situations we have been discussing is a concept of success, the assumption being that if we love God and our neighbor everything we do will turn out all right. My grandfather always maintained that his business prospered because he kept the laws of God. When we stop to think about it, we realize what a faulty concept this is. After all, it was not easy for Christ to accomplish the purposes of love in this world, and there is no reason why it should be any easier for us. It is not easy to maintain the dialogue of life; it is not easy to call forth the being of others; it is not easy to regain the freedom to love even when we respond to the spirit of love. We recognize the credibility and promise of all these principles, but wonder at the difficulty of their application.
The Work of Love
We need to remember that even God, with all of His power and wisdom, does not give His love to us in ways that take away our freedom of response. He leaves us free to say Yes or No to Him, to love, to our families, and to all the responsibilities of life. This means, as we saw earlier, that we are to speak the word of love and leave the other person free to make his response. We cannot expect a guaranteed response from him. We cannot prevent him from making a wrong response any more than we can make him give the right response. Our children are free, and we must respect that freedom. This is why the achievement of a57 love relationship is so exceedingly difficult. In the achievement of any relationship we are involved in a life-and-death struggle. Our children, for instance, want our love, care, and protection. At the same time, they want to be their own selves and to assume responsibility for their own lives. They can and do resent, with devastating hostility, action on our part that looks to them like interference with their lives. On the other hand, we love them and feel that we cannot do enough for them. The effect of our zeal often is to overwhelm them with our care and deprive them of the freedom in which to achieve their power of being.
Inevitably, then, the living dialogue between the parent and the child is both a happy and a troubled one in which the powers of love and resentment are exerted on both sides. The struggle between freedom and tyranny in human relations is understood in the struggle of the cross, which takes place in every individual and in every relationship. The actualization of ourselves in relation to one another is both difficult and painful. It is hard to understand how anybody could ever think it was easy. The struggle calls for a love that is prepared to lay down its life for its friends. The entrance of love into life brings, sometimes, not peace but a sword. Tension and conflict may accompany the work of love. The conflict between the love of God and the self-centeredness of man produces an ugly, rugged, and bloody struggle, which the crucifixion summarized.
The Power of Love
The good news of the gospel is not that a way has been given us by which to avoid conflict, but that the power of love has been given us for the conflict. With it we can enter into the shambles of life with assurance, courage, and a belief that, even though we cannot always understand what is going on, the purpose of love is to reunite man and man, and that in Christ God’s love won the initial victory in this process. We may, therefore, participate in the life of the world with all of its conflicts, including our own personal conflicts, with faith in the power of reuniting58 love. We should not be surprised when we find ourselves embroiled in conflict and involved in complex situations. Our faith is not in our ability to do right, but in the power of God to help us re-enter the difficult and unpleasant situations we have created with new hope and with healing love. We may be thankful that God revealed Himself through a cross and, therefore, made clear how realistic He is in relation to the characteristics and conditions of human existence.
The power of love is liberating. It frees us so that we can use what happens between us as a part of the curriculum of Christian living and learning. Instead of wasting our time worrying about why things happen, we can use our energies and our understandings to deal with them constructively. The purpose of Christianity is not alone the prevention of crime, but the redemption of criminals; not alone the prevention of sin, but the saving of sinners. The great Christian word is redemption, which means transforming a destructive relationship into one in which the conditions and purposes of love are realized. Let us remember that fine linen paper is made out of old dirty rags. Similarly, a wonderful Christian relationship can be formed out of one that seems tragic. As we have seen, the test of a man is not in what happens to him, but in what he does about what happens to him. The transformation of what happens in human relations is the work of the Holy Spirit, continuing the work that was begun in Christ. The Spirit gives the gift of reconciling love with which we may participate in the continuing work of Christ, which is the redemption and transformation of life. So in the context of this love we can relax while we also exercise our care.
Love and Sin
The power of love over sin is widely recognized. In the first place, there is no judgment like the judgment implicit in love. The face of love is compassionate, but it gives a light that reveals the darkness of our hearts. We know that we are judged, but we know also that we are not condemned. The judgment and59 the forgiveness come to us as a part of the communication of love. Have we not felt this as we stood in the presence of someone whose love was true? We wished to be rid of everything in us that was unworthy of that love. In that same instant there may have welled up within us a repentance and a determination to live in response to that purifying, reuniting love. Such is our experience when the Spirit of Christ brings us face to face with Him and His love. To be loved is to be illumined, purified, and transformed, because love has the power of re-creation.
Parents and others who are conscious of their failures and sins in relation to their loved ones should remember that human beings are fundamentally resilient and resourceful. Children’s springs of life and vitality are powerful. Their need to affirm themselves as persons is undeniable, and any experience of love that they have is reinforcing. Experiences of unlove are to them unbelievable and point, fundamentally and finally, to the necessity and believability of love. While our children are dependent upon us for their personal environment in which to grow up, they bring powers and resources to their growing up which are independent of us. They bring something to the dialogue in which self-actualization occurs. Their part of the dialogue is just as important and indispensable as ours. We cannot live their lives for them. They have to live their own lives, and our part is to live in relation to them and contribute our assistance to their powers of becoming.
Parents and teachers are not the only ones who influence their children. We live in a society in which different people have different roles to play in relation to everyone else. We should not measure the progress of a child only by how we see him or by what we think he is receiving from us. Our impression of the child’s progress may be mistaken. We may not be able to know him as he is, nor know what others are contributing. And, least of all, can we know the total effect of all his relationships on what he is becoming as a person. Our anxieties about a particular incident may exist because we fail to see it in its total context.60 Much happens in the development of a person’s life that we do not see, and much of the transformation occurs secretly at levels so deep that we cannot observe it. Although we may not see what is happening, we may be sure that something is. In the sphere of the personal we need to trust both God and man, and if we trust God we can trust man. We then may take a long view of our task, and teach and work and live by faith.
This is what it should mean to be a Christian and a member of the church of Christ. What a wonderful thing it is to belong to a fellowship that is made up of people who may be united by the Spirit of God and through whom we believe that God works! What a comfort it is to know that we do not have to do and believe everything ourselves! Not only do we not have to live and believe and love for ourselves, but others live and believe and love for us at times when we cannot. But let us also remember that we have to live and believe and love for them when weakness or doubt or hostility seems to overwhelm them. This is the meaning of Christian fellowship; namely, that we are not an aggregation of individuals, but instead are members of one body, with every member having his own function, and the function of every member standing in a complementary relation to that of the others, of which body Christ is the head. Here is the source of the love about which we have been speaking and the process through which love is lived in the life of the world that God loves.
11 Luke 10:27.
12 From Love, Power and Justice, by Paul Tillich, Oxford University Press, Copyright, 1954. Used by permission.
13 1 John 4:10. The title of this book was suggested by the familiar opening words of this verse in the King James Version, “Herein is love….”
14 Matt. 10:8.
15 See Luke 19:2 ff.
16 See Luke 7:37 ff.
IV61
SOME OBJECTIVES OF LOVE
“Little children, let us not love in word or speech
but in deed and in truth.”—1 John 3:18
The objective of love, as we have seen, is to “move everything to everything else that is,” especially to reunite person to person. This is an identifying characteristic of the love of God, and it is to some degree the characteristic of all love. We believe that this love was incarnate in Jesus Christ. We believe that His Spirit, active in the world in which we live, seeks to incarnate this love in us here and now. Furthermore, we have identified some more general characteristics of love. Now we turn to look at some of the ways in which love accomplishes its purpose, a purpose which is the responsibility of the church in its dispersion in the life of the world.
Love’s Sphere Is Personal
The sphere of love’s action is in the realm of the personal; it acts in and through relationships. The process by which the person emerges is both wonderful and fearful, and one for which we should have reverence, the zeal to understand, and the willingness to be responsible for. Certain specific things need to be accomplished which are the work of love, which we have already identified as the calling forth of persons. In this work of love we participate in the reconciling work of God in Christ today. Let us remember also that children first experience the love of God through their experience of their parents’ love, and that parents in loving their children are loving God, since we love God by loving one another. How else can we love God than by loving one62 another? With this understanding of the context in which we live and work and serve one another, let us turn our attention to how love’s task is accomplished.
First, however, a word about what that task is not. The objective of love is not to create or nurture a so-called normal human being. In the first place, there is no universal concept of the normal, and the criterion of normality varies from age to age and from culture to culture. All men have problems and always will have them. The pursuit of perfection is a perilous project that may cause all kinds of imperfections and will inevitably produce disillusionment.
Adjustment cannot be the goal of Christian living and the objective of love. The clam is adjusted about as well as any of God’s creatures, but has very little to offer beyond a passive role in a bowl of soup. Instead of striving to mold a person completely adjusted to his surroundings, love seeks to nurture a person who is capable of maintaining a creative tension between his need and his responsibility, between the vitality of spirit and the form of being. And, according to tests, such creative people often are classified as not normal and not well adjusted.
Nor is the pursuit of happiness the objective of love. Happiness for human beings is a forlorn hope. Because of conflicts within himself and between himself and others, man is doomed to be unhappy most of the time. He is always having to deal with the inevitable conflicts and accidents of life that give him a sense of vulnerability, both as an individual and as a member of his tribe, nation, or race. Instead, the objective of love is to provide the human being with resources, by means of which he may face his human existence with courage and with a sense of peace that passes understanding. It now remains for us to spell this out in human terms.
Dialogue Between Individual and Environment
When the human being is born, he leaves the biological exchange of the womb for the social exchange system of his society,63 where his gradually increasing capacities meet the opportunities and limitations of his culture. The appearance of the person, therefore, results from the dialogue between himself and his environment, between his growing, autonomous self and the directing community upon which he is dependent. This dialogue between the individual and his environment often has, as we have seen, the characteristics of a conflict. The individual challenges and makes demands of his family, and the family challenges and makes demands of the child. Each wrestles with the problems of trust in relation to the other, each wrestles for autonomy that is equal to the domination of the other, each strives for the initiative and industriously competes with the other, and each seeks an identity that may either exclude or include the other. The quality of the life of the individual and of the social order depends upon the results of the dialogue between them.
I am thinking of two families. In one, the parents helped their children work through their difficulties with each other, thus assuming dialogical responsibility for what happened between them. In late teenhood, each child in turn became a person in his own right who had achieved a relatively mature, congenial, and loving relation with every other member of the family. In the second family, the parents could not face the conflicts inevitable to human nature in a growing family, and pretended a quality of relationship that did not exist between them. When their children became late teen-agers and older, a smoldering antagonism existed between them which occasionally broke out in venomous quarrels. The parents of this second family had not assumed dialogical responsibility for the content of their family life, with the result that the interaction between the growing person and his environment was not creative.
The process of unfolding patterns, of decisions made in response to crises, of frustrations and achievements in living, are also the human content for religious development, and provide opportunities for both conversion and nurture. The development of a person is religiously significant, and the events in his life64 have ultimate meaning. We may think of them in only psychological and sociological dimensions, but their meaning also is theological and religious. As we weave our intricate way through the years of our lives, approaching and withdrawing, attacking and retreating, victorious and beaten, decisive and uncertain, being loved and being resented, loving and hating, and sometimes gladly and sometimes reluctantly participating in the dialogue between ourselves and our environment of influential persons, we may ask ourselves this question: What contributes to our emergence as responsible, resourceful persons? As participants in the dialogue between our children and ourselves, for example, we should like to know the kind of address and response we should make that would call them forth as persons who will be responsible and helpful in relation to their dependents, peers, and superiors; and enable us, through them, to love and serve God. How can we so participate with them in living that there will be called forth in them a courage that will dare the risks of creativity and acquire the freedom to love?
The dialogue between the individual and life is initiated by the basic question that is implicit in our being, and becomes explicit as our capacities as persons increase. The basic question is: Who am I?, and associated with it is its partner question: Who are you? These two questions have to be asked together almost as if they were one question, because there is no answer to the question: Who am I?, except as there is an answer to the question: Who are you? And this twofold question is not only asked implicitly by the newborn baby, but explicitly by his parents, whose own dialogue with the baby involves asking and receiving answers to Who are you? and Who am I? because the relationship is one in which the child also may call forth the parent as a person.
This basic twofold question is one which we all continue to ask all through our lives in many different ways. We must not associate question-asking exclusively with verbalization. Obviously, the baby cannot ask his mother in words who she is. He65 does it by his actions, by his random movements, by his crying, by his protests, by his exploring hands and eyes, by his mouth. And the mother does not give reply to his question by word only, but by her actions; by her feeding and care of him, by her neglect, by her joy in him and her irritation because of him, by her coming to him and by her unexplained departures from him. All her actions are a language by which she tells her child who she is in response to the questions implicit in his actions. And her answer to him as to who she is gives him the beginning of an answer to his question as to who he is.
Thus, the dialogue between mother and child, which is largely nonverbal, tells him that his mother is one who in some ways loves him and in others does not, and tells him also that he is one who in some ways is loved and in other ways is not. Out of this interchange emerges his manner of response which may become his style of living and loving. But we need to remember that his characteristics as a person are not wholly determined by the action of his environment, because they also are determined by who he is within himself as a unique being. His inheritance provides him a given quality and capacity. Therefore, the dialogue is to be understood also as a dialogue between heredity and environment in which his experience of love releases his power of being.
Sense of Trust
The first objective of love to be accomplished out of the dialogue between the individual and the world is the awakening in him of a sense of basic trust. Trust toward oneself and toward others is acquired to some degree during the first year. I have discussed this at some length in an earlier book, Man’s Need and God’s Action,17 and here, as well as there, I acknowledge my indebtedness to the work of Erik Erikson.18 In this chapter I shall66 discuss the other senses that he identifies as necessary acquisitions of the growing personality.
Perhaps the greatest contribution to the achievement of basic trust is through the experience of being fed. The experience of being fed regularly and responsibly causes the child to respond with trust, and he learns to have faith long before he knows the word for it. Later, at the appropriate time he acquires the word “faith” to point to the meaning of his trust experiences. If, still later, he allows the words to take the place of the substance of his faith, they will become empty words. Responsible parents and teachers seek to combine the right word with their action so that the meaning of the child’s experiences is correlated with the words for them. A mature correlation between word and experience is one in which the child has the experience of finding people both trustworthy and untrustworthy, and has been helped to deal with the untrustworthiness in the context of trust. His first experience, therefore, is a realistic one in which he is strengthened by his experiences of trust, and is not made too anxious by his experiences of the inevitable failures of his loved ones to take care of him perfectly.
The child’s experience of trust and mistrust contains the first meanings for his Christian education. The care of the Divine Father is expressed in and through the care of his earthly parents. His response to the care of his earthly parents is his response to his Divine Father. This needs to be interpreted to the child as he grows up, so that he will accept and believe in the participating presence of God in human life. An obstacle in the way of this achievement occurs when people separate God from life and make Him a kind of absentee operator of the machine called the world. It then is necessary for the child to make a huge leap from his trust of his parents to faith in God. While we cannot equate parental action with divine action, nevertheless we can affirm that divine action takes place through human action. When such an affirmation is made and accepted as a part of the parents’ faith and is interpreted to the child as he is able to receive it, he is67 helped to grow up with a religious understanding of life itself, rather than conceiving of religion as being merely a part of life. He will grow up with the idea that being trustworthy and trusting others has not only psychological and sociological meaning, but also theological meaning.
A sense of trust is basic, because without it the further development of the individual would not be possible. Its foundations are laid in the very first year of an individual’s life. The act of taking from his mother not just food, but her ministrations, her companionship and friendliness, is the beginning of his emergence as an individual apart from his parents. As he becomes an individual person, he immediately begins to be a giver as well as a taker. Giving, as well as receiving, must become a part of the dialogical relation between two individuals, whether between a child and the parent, or between two adults. As soon as a child begins to become a giver, the parent must consent to be a receiver of that which the child has to give, and thus, again, is a relationship of basic trust established.
Without parental reception the child would not be affirmed as a giver, and would, out of his mistrust, become a compulsive taker, a result that is tragic not only psychologically and sociologically, but religiously as well. He will not be able to trust God; but because he needs to trust God, he will begin to create images of God in the context of which he will try to handle his existential problems. Thus, the foundations of a false religion may be laid in early childhood, and this false religion, as it matures, closes the person off from the truth of the gospel and keeps him from becoming an instrument of the gospel in relation to the whole world. The church is filled with people who do not really trust God, even though they publicly profess their faith in Him. These people, like Mr. Clarke, Mrs. Strait, and the others, live timidly.
We must not conclude that the establishment of basic trust concerns only infants. The balance between trust and mistrust is something that concerns us all our days, and the question is raised68 acutely again every time we face a danger in the circumstances of our lives. I have observed that when people come together in a new group relationship, their basic questions, Who am I? and Who are you?, are reactivated. Significant communication between them does not take place until some relationship of trust is established on the basis of satisfactory answers. Our initial asking of these questions in infancy is, to some degree, repeated at subsequent times in our lives. They are repeated in times of marriage, bereavement, retirement, death, or in my personal crisis; and also when we face the threat of war or the possibility of interplanetary existence, or in any economic, social, or political crisis. Needed at these times of threat are relationships with sufficient power to enable us to participate in the dialogue out of which will come the answers to our questions. The objective of love is to provide the relationship of love for a world that, again and again, and in an infinite variety of ways, asks the basic questions: Who am I? and Who are you?
How wonderful it is to participate in the answer to the basic questions! Mothers, for instance, who tend to lose the sense of purpose in the minutiae of their responsibilities, could be helped to realize how profoundly important is the care they give their children. The way in which they feed and care for their families may be, if they opened themselves to the presence and action of God in human life, the means of their child’s union with man and God.
As we try to meet the physical and emotional needs of children, and travel with them through the various crises of life in which we both participate, we may have the reassurance that we are doing a great work, the full meaning of which we may not be able to see at the moment. Furthermore, we may be reassured that we are participating in the work of God in the world and engaged in the true ministry of the church in the world. When there is this living that awakens and renews trust, the formal teaching and religious observances of the church both receive and give additional meaning.69
Sense of Autonomy
The second objective of love is the achievement of a sense of autonomy. We said earlier that as the child begins to take that which is given to him, he begins to distinguish between himself and others, and thereby to become a separate person. In so doing, he begins to achieve some degree of autonomy as an independent person. This second task is made easier for him, if he is able to approach it with a sense of trust. The need for a sense of trust in the achievement of autonomy becomes apparent once we recognize what this second task involves. It introduces the child into a conflict of interests. On the one hand, he needs the constant care, supervision, and love of his parents; and on the other hand, he needs to assert his own will and stand over against his parents as a separate person. He both needs to be a part of the mother and distinct from her. The conflict between these needs increases as the individual becomes a person.
This process, however, often results in a warfare of unequal wills between the child and the parent. The child himself is capable of violent drives which frighten him and which he is unable to control; and the parent can be provoked to emotional responses that escape his control and are frightening. The relationship between them, therefore, may become one in which each is seeking to dominate and control the other. This pattern occurs in all relationships and is often observed in marriage, where, by various kinds of behavior, each partner seeks to control the other.
The muscular mechanism basic to the achievement of autonomy is the mechanism of holding on and letting go. By the employment of it, the individual begins to be aware of his powers as a separate person. Awareness of these powers and of the possibilities inherent in them precipitates the struggle between him and others. A child can be very pliable or very stubborn in his holding on or letting go, and it is not long before parents discover that they cannot make a child do something that he will not do. At this point, the parent’s own maturity in the employment of the same mechanisms will determine how he will respond to the70 child’s stubborn and often hostile efforts to achieve autonomy.
As people mature, the holding-on and letting-go tension is transferred from the muscular to the emotional and psychological. If adults have achieved a relaxed attitude, they will be able to provide the child with firmness, and at the same time allow him some freedom in determining his own action. An environment of freedom and authority will help him achieve a balance between love and hate, co-operation and willfulness. An early sense of trust, we see, is necessary for the development of autonomy. Without trust the child will not feel free to struggle, as he must, for its achievement. He will not feel free, because he does not have faith either in himself or in his world, in relation to which he must struggle.
The objective of love, therefore, is to provide a relationship of firmness and tolerance within which a child may become autonomous and acquire a sense of self-control, self-esteem, and relationship with others. Otherwise he may suffer loss of confidence in himself and become skeptical of others, a result which can be the fruit of either restrictive discipline or unstructured freedom.
The achievement of a sense of autonomy must always remain relative, and will vary from individual to individual. As we have seen, there is no fixed norm for human behavior, and the best sense of autonomy that anyone can possibly achieve is one in which there is a mixture of co-operation and willfulness, of love and hostility. We can only hope and pray that as we all mature our autonomy will be employed with creative good will, and that it will be capable of dealing with the results of our hostility and stubbornness.
Although our sense of autonomy appears during our second and third year of life, its further development depends upon our relationship with others. Furthermore, its employment has other arenas than that of family life. The dialogue from which autonomy grows moves out of family and into the neighborhood. It is quickened and disciplined by entrance into school, is heated and tempered by the development of social life, especially by the71 dialogue between the sexes when the need to surrender oneself to the other meets the needs of each to be oneself.
Finally, the autonomy of the individual is sure to be challenged by the complexities and organization of modern industrial society. More and more the individual is being caught in the intricacies of a process in which his sense of autonomy and initiative is violated. The problems of the social order are so massive that the interests of the individual often are sacrificed. Increasingly, people are unable to endure the frustrations caused by their social, political, and industrial environment, and develop neurotic responses in which their aggressions are turned in on themselves. The autonomy and initiative that once belonged to the individual have been transferred to the social order, with the result that instead of individuals receiving their direction from within, they now receive it from without, with the inevitable demand for conformity, in which the integrity of the individual is apt to be sacrificed. Every time he turns on his radio or television set, his autonomy is assaulted by all kinds of pressures.
This condition presents education and religion with peculiar challenges. In order to minister to the world, it is necessary that one participate in the life of the world and share its problems as did our Lord. But if we are to be the instrument of God’s purpose in the work of the world, it will be necessary for us to have a sense of autonomy and a power of independence. This is what it means to be in the world but not of the world.
One of the objectives of love, therefore, is so to live with one another, especially with our children, that out of that relationship we may emerge with such a power of being as a person that we shall be able to face the complexities, pressures, deprivations, and dangers of modern life. Our aim is to help the child become a responsible participant in the crucial issues of life, and to preserve his integrity as a deciding person. The answer to his questions, Who am I? and Who are you?, will then be: I am what I will, and you are what you will; and our relationship is one of mutuality in which each will call forth the other. If the awakening72 of a sense of autonomy is an objective of love, it is also the objective of the church’s life, its teaching, and its evangelistic endeavor. Without power of autonomy and independence, Christians will be mere conformists and maintainers of the status quo.
Sense of Initiative
The third objective of love is to help the individual achieve a sense of initiative. At the age of four or five, a child is faced with his next crisis and must take his next big step. He must find out what kind of person he is going to be. His search will be strengthened by his experience of trust, and by whatever power of autonomy he has. Dr. Erikson points out that he wants to be like his parents who seem very wonderful to him, but who, at the same time, present him with very real threats. During this age he plays at being his parents. According to Dr. Erikson, there are three strong developments which help him, but which also contribute to his crisis. “First, he learns to move around more freely and more violently, and therefore establishes a wider, and so it seems to him, an unlimited radius of goals. Two, his sense of language becomes perfected to the point where he understands and can ask about many things just enough to misunderstand them thoroughly; and three, both language and locomotion permit him to expand his imagination over so many things that he cannot avoid frightening himself with what he himself has dreamed and thought up. Nevertheless, out of all this he must emerge with a sense of unbroken initiative as a basis for a high, and yet realistic, sense of ambition and independence.”19
Initiative is the power that moves the individual to take over the role of others; the boy, his father; the girl, her mother; later as the driver of the car, and later still, leadership roles of various kinds. The struggles in the process are accompanied by feelings of anxiety, of inadequacy, and of guilt. Feelings of inadequacy in relation to the size and powers of the adult can be considerable; and the feelings of guilt, in response to the daydreams about73 replacing Daddy, for instance, are crucial, and too often are unrecognized by many parents and teachers. They need to recognize and accept the developmental reasons for the child’s preoccupations and fantasies about himself in relation to them and their roles and functions. Furthermore, it is entirely appropriate for him to be physically aggressive toward others, to overwhelm them with his incessant chattering, his aggressive getting into things, and his insatiable curiosity about everything. The objective of love at this time is to provide the child with a reasonable freedom within which to develop his initiative with a minimum sense of guilt in relation to its exercise, and with the hope that by so doing he will become a person whose creativity will not be frustrated by an overdeveloped sense of guilt.
In contrast, many people are embarrassed by recognition of their achievements, and are prevented from achievement because of guilt feelings that block their creative efforts. Unfortunately, too much religious teaching has made people feel guilty about initiative and aggressiveness, both of which can be expressed creatively. From childhood on, lives are hedged about by prohibitions in relation to persons bearing authority, by belittling attitudes toward themselves and toward their drives to compete and to get ahead, so that people become self-restricted and are kept from living up to their inner capacities or from using their powers of imagination and feeling. While some withdraw into a dull kind of existence, others overcompensate in a great show of tireless initiative and a quality of “go-at-it-iveness” at all costs. These people often overdo to a point where they can never relax, and they feel that their worth as people consists entirely in what they are doing rather than in what they are.
The objective of love is to help the child accept the necessary structures, authorities, and personal roles in relation to which he must live, so that he may grow in his capacity to love persons and to use things. During this stage of life, children often turn to other adults for companionship and guidance. They do so because the conflicts between themselves and these new adults do74 not seem to be as great as with their own parents. They need these “fresh” relationships where they can exercise initiative without too much conflict and guilt. Here the school and church, with its trained teachers and workers, have an opportunity to supplement, and even to correct, the experiences that children are having at home. We should remember, however, that the identifications with the parent are important, and that the experiences the youngsters are having with others should be of a complementary nature, even if they also are corrective.
Another and supplementary objective of love is the provision of a relationship by parents or others in which a spirit of equality makes possible an experience of doing things together, instead of a relationship in which the child has to compete unequally with the adult. Fathers, for instance, may be of great help to their sons. Boys are apt to feel that their fathers are too big, too powerful, and too skillful; but if the father will base the relationship on some interest or experience common to them both, the boy has an opportunity to grow in initiative and to develop his capacities without a sense of unequal competition.
The answer to the child’s questions. Who am I? and Who are you?, will then be: I am what I conceive myself to be, and you are what I conceive you to be according to my understanding of how you have revealed yourself. At this particular time in the development of the individual, there begin to be formed the powerful images of ourselves and others that aid or hinder our relationship with one another.
Sense of Industry
A fourth objective of love is to help the individual to a sense of industry, for the child has now become a busy little person who needs to learn how to be busy with things and persons. A child’s “busyness” begins with his play. Children play separately at first. In their youngest years, they may sit apart in the same room, each playing with his own things, and each oblivious of the other except when one may discover that the other has something he75 wants. Later, as they grow and mature, there begins what we call parallel play. They play along side of each other. Now they are aware of each other, and each keeps an eye on his playmate. Their separate playing seems to have an influence on the other in that they imitate each other. Then, at a still later stage, they begin to play together. The high point of this achievement, still later, is team play, which begins in adolescence or even earlier.
Now begins the capacity for directed fellowship. The fellowship of a team is to be respected. Membership on the team may mean more to the boy than membership in his church, and this may cause ministers, parents, and teachers considerable anxiety. Instead, they should relax and be glad for the youngster’s experience, because team play is providing him with an experience of relationship that later will become the basis for his understanding of the ultimate meaning of all relationships. They should accept the youngster’s experience and use it creatively, to help him understand the nature of the church, our relationship as brothers, and the “captaincy” of Christ.
In team play, also, we see the occurrence of something that is very much a part of Christian character. In order for there to be team play, it is necessary for every member of the team to die to the desire in him to be the whole show. A mature team member has learned that his strength and skills depend on the strength and skills of others. This is the theology of the playground. What has been learned in play may be translated into work. Then, since a man’s work is one of the great spheres in which he may exercise his ministry as a representative of Christ, the learning of this profound lesson in the process of play is an important part of his religious education. And it can be religious, even though it may not be learned in the formal church.
The transition from play to work takes place gradually. Children become dissatisfied with play and make-believe, and have a growing need to be useful, to make things well, and, therefore, to acquire a sense of industry. They also learn to win recognition by producing things. Through play they advance to new stages76 of real mastery in the use of toys and things, and learn to master experience by meditation, experimenting, and planning. The home, the school, and the church should try to help them to make this transition easily in order that they may develop this sense of industry without a sense of inadequacy. If they are pushed too strenuously to produce, a sense of inadequacy may result, especially when they still want to be cuddled and cared for. Family life has the responsibility of preparing the youngsters for school, where, in the context of their play experiences, they accept the disciplines of work. Relaxed teachers are needed who understand the process by which children learn to move from play to work, and who can encourage them to make this transition without either sparing them the needed disciplines or imposing them too strenuously. Here we see an area in which the role of the family and the role of the school are complementary.
The acquisition of a sense of industry is a decisive step in learning to do things with others and alongside others. This will become a major source of satisfaction and the area of his greatest service.
Sense of Identity
A fifth objective of love is to nurture in the human being a sense of identity which is acquired and consolidated in a new way during adolescence. Dr. Erikson describes identity as the “accrued confidence that one’s ability to maintain inner sameness and continuity is matched by the sameness and continuity of one’s meaning for others.”20
As an individual develops and acquires skills, he thinks of himself as one who can do things, and his important people may hold a variety of expectations of him: “He’s clumsy,” “He never can do anything right”; or, “I can always count on him,” “He’s got the right stuff in him.” Out of his achievements and the attitudes of others toward him, his sense of self-esteem and prestige is built, little by little. As crisis after crisis is passed and the77 individual meets each of them with reasonable resourcefulness and receives the encouragement and recognition of others, he begins to believe in himself, to have a consistent expectation of what he will do in the face of various circumstances and relationships. In this way he begins to acquire a style of living which is his own and which contributes to his sense of identity and to others’ identification of him.
In the achievement of a sense of self-identity, the child needs models with which to identify himself. Especially is this true during his adolescence. He needs association with men who are clear about being men, and women who are clear about being women, and who are capable of and practice a reasonably wholesome relationship with each other. He needs men and women who have convictions, who can distinguish between right and wrong, who hold these convictions firmly, and yet not rigidly. He needs guides and counselors who can help him bring together and concentrate his various and fluctuating drives and interests, and who are not dismayed or misled by the inconsistencies and fluctuations that may accompany his development. He needs help in choosing a job, because self-identification is dependent upon some kind of occupational identity. Finally, he needs help in acquiring, as a part of his sense of self-identity, a sense of vocation, of being called to something that is greater than himself, which will draw him forth as a participant in the deepest meaning of life. The providing of this kind of relationship to help the individual acquire an indispensable sense of identity is another of love’s objectives.