<div class='adsense' style='text-align:center; padding: 0px 3px 0.5em 3px;'> </div> Love is Really Enough

Και ο λοςος σαρξ εςενετο
και εσκηνωσεν εν ημιν.
John 1:14

Leaving from Simbanggabi Mass at the Church of the Gesù at the Ateneo Campus in Loyola the other evening, I bumped into my friend’s sister who had just gotten married last December 21 in Caleruega, Tagaytay. Even amidst the mill of Christmas churchgoers rushing home to their noche buena feasts, one could sense a certain timelessness about them, a certain glow and contentment of just being in each other’s company, a certain joy of being in love at Christmastime.

The Christmas bride never looked as beautiful, I thought, as I congratulated her on her recent wedding. She cheerfully replied, “Merry Christmas!” leaning her head on the arm of her new husband. I had never seen anyone as happy, and I could feel, she knew she was home.

Finally driving home from Gesù, I caught another glimpse of them walking at the side of the road, his arm draped gently over her shoulders, her arm comfortably tucked around his waist. And beneath the strands of golden starlight that was Bellarmine field at Christmastime, they laughed; they laughed like the world did not matter; they laughed like the moment was eternally theirs. You could see it in the honesty of their faces and the innocence of their touch: they were two friends bound finally by the promise of forever.

I watched them, half envying the magic of the moment that they possessed, and realized that Christmas was not only for children; it was also for lovers.

That is why I could not help but feel a tinge of sadness while reveling in their Christmas joy, remembering yet another friend of mine who was alone this Christmastime, and what she had to tell me.

The scene of our meeting was almost quite the same, with the tinsel and the lights, and the chilly December night. Like this December bride, she too was deeply in love, and I could feel, she was comfortably at home. Married for almost three years, she was convinced that she had found her soul mate. But that evening, over coffee and gifts, I had learned that they had decided to go their separate ways.

It was a difficult choice, she said. But being apart was better than actually being a couple. The fights were getting unbearable. For a while, they tried to hold things together. But between work, and life, and making a living, there seemed to be little time for the old laughter, or the old magic, or the old friendship.

“Who knows,” I told her, “Perhaps you just need this time apart.” Certainly, there was still a chance, she said. But even if there was, it would never be the same. She was right, of course.

“But you still love him, don’t you?” I asked. And quite certainly, she replied yes. Then she smiled, a small sad smile, and whispered, more to herself than to me, “I do,” like she did, when she was married. “But you know,” she followed, pausing a moment, feeling the bitter pang in the heart, “You’ll learn that love is never enough. It isn’t enough.”

These words of hers stayed with me through this Christmas rush of tinsel and parties and gifts and music, even through the dreamy stars of Bellarmine field and its December brides. Being gone for very long in the world of reputations and appearances, lawyers and professions, reality and the greyness of growing up, I knew and somehow felt the truth of the words she spoke: people die, dreams end, love fades away. In the reality of everyday drudgery, it appears that love is never enough.

* * *

Tonight, Christendom remembers and celebrates the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. In a hundred churches and in a hundred languages, with incense, hymns and ancient prayers, young and old alike will once again stand before the sacred altar and listen to that story of the first silent night when humanity was finally granted its Savior.

While they were there, the days of her confinement were completed, and she gave birth to her first born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, for there was no room for him in the place where travelers lodged. [Luke 2:6-7].

The simplicity of Luke’s language deceives us, for it would seem that the story of that first Christmas was a story of just another birth of just another child. Rightfully so, perhaps, for indeed, it was. But it was more; for it was not only Mary’s first born son that was born that holy night, but also the Savior of humankind; and it was not only the Savior of humankind that came on that cold wintry evening in Bethlehem over two thousand years ago, but it was God Himself.

Perhaps Fr. Horacio dela Costa, S.J. sums it best when he writes, “We were promised a Savior, but we never dreamed that God Himself would come to save us. We know that He loved us, but we never dared to think that He loved us so much as to become like us.”

Indeed, the Incarnation was a surprise that defied all reason, expectation, and belief. Imagine for a moment, the God of all that is seen and unseen, existent from the beginning and creator of all, entering human history not as a majestic booming voice in the heavens, but as a human being like us, and a baby, no less. Who could have imagined it? Yet it was true— the shepherds and the wise men knew that it was true, and we, the heirs of such a joyous revelation, know it also: God Himself had in fact come into human history, at last, and forevermore, and man was never to be the same.

Another great Jesuit, Fr. Catalino Arévalo, S.J. points out that one of the earliest theological concepts which the fledgling Christian Church often returned to in explaining the Faith was the meaning of the Incarnation, and the understanding of Jesus’s nature. Setting down this belief in a specific formula, the early Church affirmed Jesus Christ as:

God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God, begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man [Nicene Creed].

It was necessary to enunciate this nature of Jesus both as true-God by substance and true-Man by birth, because in Christ’s being in-carnis— of the flesh like us— the Church preached a reality that was absent from all pagan belief of that time, and one that will perhaps resonate with us today, two thousand years later: that God suffered.

That God died.

By Jesus’s Incarnation, the Church Fathers tell us, even the darkest of human fears, the deepest of human sufferings, the most senseless of human deaths, God, through Jesus, has experienced and has therefore made Divine. The desert places in our lives are no longer unvisted, because here too, God has entered. For he is Emmanuel— God with us, definitively, and forever.

But what is more amazing— as though this was not amazing enough— is the inescapable conclusion drawn from this coming (indeed, the very reason for his dying): that God became man as a revelation of the depth of His love for us. “For God so loved the world that he gave us his only son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” [John 3:16] Through the Incarnation, God’s love now seems ever more palpable, ever more near, ever more personal, embodied now in the human face of a babe in the arms of his virgin mother.

And suddenly, all of human suffering takes on a different dimension, all of human frailty and indecision, all of human fault and folly, as the Divine Love takes them all into Himself, transforming even the darkest corners of man’s darkest days into vehicles of grace and salvation. Death and suffering no longer are impenetrable uncertainties man experiences alone; imbued with His abiding presence, man is now never alone, even in this suffering, even in this death, all because He has come, and in His coming, what was His meaning? “Wit it well: Love was His meaning.” [Julian of Norwich]

* * *

The Christian philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrandt would often say that the chasm that separates God and man is so great that man, by himself, cannot cross it. That is why he is always left searching; he is always left waiting.

The Mystery of the Incarnation celebrates that moment when God Himself chose to cross that chasm of our humanity in order to “pitch his tent among us,” because loving us, He desired to make every human endeavor, every human reality, even human suffering and human death, something of Himself.

By this Incarnation, there no longer is anything alien to the heart of God, for He has entered into the smallest and most insignificant of human experiences and has infused it with His love; yes, even the most mundane of mornings, when it is difficult to get up for school; or the most lonely of evenings, when the empty silence greets a long drive home. He is even present when lovers stroll beneath strands of golden starlight at Bellarmine field, and when lovers wake up apart because love has failed and love is not enough. For He too has known of these things, of friendship, betrayal, loss, hope, and love— human love, frail and ephemeral, He has also made his own.

Indeed, although the cynic inside me still says that in this grey-grown world, love may not be enough, I am comforted by the warm knowledge that where love is lacking, God comes and takes what is left, and makes glory of the emptiness, and fills it with his own. For God, in his coming, never promised us that life would be smooth sailing; only that He be in the ship with us, as Emmanuel— God-with-us— guiding us through the storms and rough seas; and His love, through the squall, would be reassurance enough.

As Christmas morning scatters the darkness of this long and dreary night, I pray that the wonder of that first Christmas when God definitively said “I love you” be ever fresh in your hearts, and may this love, that conquers even death, be for you love that is enough.