Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Shelray and I have been a little light on the blogging since we are up here enjoying the beautiful Adirondack summer.  While it began with rain, the weekend has turned out to be sunny, cool, and dry.  A great place to visit, especially for Shelray who is coming from SATX.

We were discussing the thread in which he explained why he was removing Clerical Whispers from the blogroll. A commenter who self-identified as sotto voce claimed to be the priest who runs said blog. Shelray and I discussed the very predictability of the tired arguments he regurgitated of those who argue that love needs to take precedence over truth. To be fair this is not exactly what they say. Rather, they more seem to argue that whatever makes feelings seem at most ease must be the truth.

In looking back over some recent posts this seems to be a fairly common theme among some of our threads. Earlier this year a slip down the stairs brought this to mind with respect to too many homilies I have heard.  We heard this same theme in a thread begun when Father Doyle responded to an earlier post Shelray did on a book Doyle did with Richard Sipe. In fact, this thread motivated a further post. This theme even came up with one of B16’s Wednesday Audiences in discussing Jesus’ exclusive love.

I suppose part of the problem for these folks in thinking that love ought to trump everything else is that there is little understanding of the meaning of the term. Our emotivist culture equates love with gushy feelings. The problem with this is that the demand to love becomes contradictory. When it is simply feelings, love disappears into the wind and we are not responsible for losing it in our relationships. So how can anyone make the demand that we love others if we have no control over it?

In the latter case, if one is to make this demand to love even slightly intelligible, it must be that to love means to try to ensure that no ill feelings can arise that might otherwise squelch the squishy feelings of authentic love? Perhaps this might make it somewhat more logical to make the demand but avoiding bad feelings certainly is not the same as experiencing the squishy feelings.  If trying to avoid the bad feelings is the same thing, then wouldn’t this remove the justification for the claim that one has fallen out of love?

This type of vague thinking always leads to irony.  An irony here is that many of these “emotivist lovers” seem to follow up very quickly after setting their reductionist vision of love as the touchstone for moral righteousness with the admonition not to judge others. This is always in the context of judging whether a particular action is evil or not. The irony is that what they are doing is judging others’ actions as wrong in asserting that their interlocutor (usually a C-L-S blogger) ought not to be judging another. As with all relativist arguments, they do not seem to realize they are falling into this contradictory position.

Any way, I could agree with the statement as St. Augustine would:  all we do need is love. However, authentic love is a much more difficult and demanding proposition than those who profess the idea can imagine. In fact, by their actions they show they are not up to the task.  I suppose if they recognized the demands that authentic love makes, they might be forced to look for some other new, less rigorous rule of life.