| Love as Intimacy and Transcendence
February 1, 2004 Homily
Fr. George Smiga
Luke 4:21-30
“Faith, hope, and love abide, these three and the greatest of these is love.” This line concludes one of the most beautiful and profound passages in the Scriptures: the famous hymn to love from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians which we heard as today's second reading. In this hymn Paul asserts that love is the greatest gift. This is another way of saying that without love we miss life. We must have love if our lives are to be fulfilled and complete.
What does Paul mean by love? It includes, but it is something much greater than romantic love. In fact, a careful reading of Paul's hymn to love will reveal that there are two distinct aspects of the kind of love that Paul is describing.
The first aspect pulls us towards other people. In the first part of the hymn Paul describes the qualities which allow us to bond with others. Love is patient, love is kind, love is not envious, or puffed up. Love is not self-seeking or rude. These qualities of love allow us to connect to others, to commit to others. If we use modern terminology, we would call this movement of love that binds us to others intimacy. Paul is saying that without intimacy in our lives are incomplete.
But as you continue to read the hymn another aspect of love emerges: an aspect which moves us beyond ourselves, beyond our understanding, even beyond the people we love. Paul says, “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully even as I am known.” Paul is pointing to the part of life that pulls us beyond ourselves into something larger. A modern word we would use to characterize this aspect of love is transcendence. Paul is saying that without transcendence life is incomplete.
So when Paul tells us that we must have love, he is insisting that our lives must be characterized by intimacy and transcendence. We must have both if we are truly to live. Unless we let love pull us towards intimacy with another person our lives will be impoverished. That intimacy could be with a spouse or with a close friend. But what is clear is that that movement toward intimacy involves work. Some people identify intimacy with a feeling or a verbal marriage commitment. Intimacy, however, involves the work that Paul describes in the first part of the hymn. Intimacy is being patient with the other, listening to the other, understanding the other, respecting the other in his or her uniqueness, adapting our lives to meet the other's needs and dreams.
There is a delightful little movie now in the theaters. I saw it this weekend. It is called “A Date With Tad Hamilton.” It is not a great movie but it has a number of wonderful scenes. In one, Tad Hamilton says to the female lead, “Come away with me. I love you.” She responds, “No, you don't love me. You love the idea of loving me. You really don't know me. Real love,” she says, “is knowing the details of another person.” Intimacy is knowing the details. Intimacy is appreciating the specific things in others that make them to be who they are. If we then are going to claim intimacy with someone, we have to claim more than a feeling, more than a certificate. We have to be able to recount what are the specific things that make that person to be who he or she is and rejoice in that particularity. As Paul states in this hymn, “Love rejoices in the truth.” When we know the truth of another person's life and they know the truth of our life and when we both rejoice in what we know, then we have intimacy.
But intimacy is not enough. We also need transcendence. We need the ability of seeing something greater than ourselves, of understanding that there is something beyond all the things that we can organize and control. We must know what it is to step over the line from knowledge to mystery. That trusting of ourselves to mystery is what Paul calls love. If we insist on limiting our lives to only the things that we can see and feel, if we insist on limiting our lives to only the things we can understand and control, our lives are impoverished. It is a failure of love.
Love then pulls us in two different directions, towards intimacy and towards transcendence. We must have both to truly live. Moreover, because love pulls in two directions, there are two distinct abilities that we must encourage in our lives: holding on and letting go.
Intimacy demands that we hold on to another, that we commit ourselves to the hard work of listening, changing, and appreciating. If we are to be intimate we must not be afraid to commit, to hold on. Transcendence demands the ability of letting go, of understanding when we have come to the point where we no longer have control, when there is something greater than ourselves into which we can entrust our lives. A full and complete life demands the ability to hold on to the people we love and to let go at those times when mystery begins. Knowing when to do each is the key to happiness.
Love is indeed the greatest of gifts, but it pulls us in two distinct directions. Therefore, the Scriptures today invite us to examine our lives and to assure ourselves that we are open both to intimacy and to transcendence. If we wish our life to be complete, to be fulfilled, if we want to be happy, we must learn how to hold on to the people we love and how to let ourselves go into the embrace of a God who loves us.
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