To repeat, sex is a function in an office of love, namely marriage, but in itself sex «is not a
function of human love».
The feelings we have progress through several stages, very similar to those experienced after the
loss of a human loved one.
In
terms of human love, on all levels and in general, we certainly all have this capacity for it and find it in many places.
She gave them their very first
taste of human love and the girls began to open up, explore the world, and their personalities even started to peek through.
They often spend the last days of their lives in a small cage,
void of the human love and companionship that they crave.
For that reason, we do not speak
of human love as a pure choice unconnected to the attributes of the beloved.
But we may yet regard humanitarianism as a
form of human love which, though it can not be identified with agape, reflects human values which agape incorporates and fulfils It is true that the Bible does not speak of a general fraternity of humanity which we recognize just because we are human.
The answer lies in an examination of where the traditional Christian doctrine has failed to grasp the real life
of the human loves in their creativity and their power, and in their tendency to reach their own limits.
In contrast, the Catholic
ethic of human love seeks to help people achieve happiness, personal integration, and a life grounded in Jesus Christ and the truth.
We do find pointers to meaning in our lives — in
acts of human love, in the way justice can be partially achieved even through structures of injustice, in a life of perfect sacrificial love that ends upon a cross.
Chastity under vow is that type
of human love which reaches its perfection independently of sex.
Imagination offers all the suggestion of the endless
delights of human love, the metaphysics of love, the recurrent surprises of the human condition.
The
power of human love to free the neighbor should not be minimized, but it should not be exaggerated either.
Are we not saying that the most intimate and important
kind of human love is inappropriate for expressing some aspects of the God - human relationship?
When we
speak of the human loves we mean those which belong to our humanity, and distinguish these from God's love as agape, that is the new love which God puts into the world through his dealing with man's sin and unlove.
Thus the Protestant Reformation is a decisive moment in the history of the understanding of love, whether one accepts this position or not, for it raises in the sharpest possible way the question of the
meaning of the human loves when seen in the light of the love of God as known to faith through Jesus.
Something must re-create the capacity to belong in the society of God's creatures so that man finds his security in giving himself to the service and enjoyment of God and His Kingdom as the ultimate
context of every human love.
It seeks to answer the question, «What is the meaning and truth of the Christian assertions that God is love, that love to God and the neighbor are the two great commandments, that the
fulfillment of human love depends upon God's action of reconciliation, and that the love of God is the ground of all hope?»
Process theology undertakes a search for an alternative to the Augustinian understanding of love and being in which the freedom and
creativity of human loves have their place, and in which the love of God is understood in his involvement with a real history.
We come to the question of what use we can make of this analysis
of human love when we speak of the love of God.
If individuality, freedom, action and suffering, causality, and impartiality are categorical
conditions of human love, then there is an initial presumption for Christian thought that the being of God, who is love, is in some way reflected in these structures of our existence.
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Now comes this report for the synod, which suggests that, on matters of marriage, the family, the
morality of human love, and the things that make for genuine happiness, German Catholic thinking is virtually indistinguishable from that of non-believers.
He will remind members of the congregation that the Church has for 20 centuries defended and proposed the «greatness of marriage» as a «path to holiness, for the
perfecting of human love and as the foundation of the family».
The struggles faced today by East and West demand a new insight into the human condition, an insight realized in the cross of a self - giving God and consummated in the
response of human love and obedience.
This is a very healthy corrective to a great deal that has unquestionably disfigured the history of institutional Christianity; for instance, the sometimes subtle but persistent belittling of the richest and most profound of human experiences, as if the
joys of human love were somehow suspect, and not among the most sheerly precious experiences that life has to offer.
Why, for instance, has he spent so much of his time translating the
frustrations of human love and politics, be they Tibullus» or Petrarch's?