In my years as a priest, I have learned that there is an enormous difference between love and attachment.
Take Selena for example. Selena was married for 52 years when her husband was diagnosed with cancer. Lung cancer. He tried every kind of treatment, researched thoroughly. She was with him every step of the way, her love never failed him. But he grew tired. After a year of treatments, he told her that he was ready to die. “No,” she said. “You are not ready to die. We can beat this thing.” “Honey, I am tired,” he said. “My body doesn’t work right. I am old. Let me go.” But she couldn’t. She held on to him for months. I kept asking her to give him permission to die, but she could not. Even though it would have made him so peaceful, she could not. He grew incredibly thin, he lingered on, his dying prolonged. Finally, he passed away in great pain. His dying was prolonged because his wife could not let him go. Even though he begged her, she would not let go.
My friend Anna waited to get married. She wanted to find the perfect man. By 38, she began to realize that the perfect man might not be out there, so she settled for a good man. And once they got married, they immediately began to try and have children.
Anna wanted to be a mother her whole life. Her happily ever after consisted of a husband and two kids, a boy and a girl. When she gave birth to first a girl and then a boy, she thought that this was it. Life had reached its climax. She was beginning her happily ever after. And she loved her children. Oh, she loved them. She stopped working to take care of them, focusing on every little detail from their diet to their clothing to their activities. She was the perfect mom.
But her children began to have behavioral issues fairly early on. Her daughter seemed angry and would throw large temper tantrums. Her son seemed unfocused, dazed. And the more they did not fit the mold, the harder she tried. She was consumed with anxiety. This was not the way that it was supposed to go. Her children had everything that a child could ask for, so why were they not behaving? She gave them everything. She loved them so much. And they were angry.
20 years after Jesus’ resurrection, when the people who loved Jesus were gathering together for meals and forming the first churches, Paul wrote a letter to the church in Corinth. The Corinthians were confused. They worshipped Roman gods, enjoyed the sexual freedoms of the Greek temples, and then came to church. They did not know how to love God let alone how to behave. Paul wrote one of this best letters to the church at Corinth partially because he was so frustrated. There is nothing like a problem to make you dig deep for the right words. The children of God were going astray and he wanted them to understand how to walk in Jesus’ ways.
Paul wrote one of the most beautiful passages of all time in his first letter to the Corinthians. It reads like a hymn, all about love and the true nature of love. We hear it again and again at weddings, funerals, special ceremonies. Tony Blair read it aloud at Lady Diana’s funeral. We have heard it a million times. It is the passage of a lifetime. Paul talks about how we see through a glass dimly in this life. It is as if a lens is placed in front of our eyes at birth. In order to love one another, we must be able to see each other through the glass.
I went to the Residences for a lovely lunch last week. The apartment that I visited was so beautiful, but the glass needed cleaning. You could see the beautiful view of the city from five or six stories up, but there was a lot of dust on the windows. I wanted to ask when they would be cleaned again.
It struck me that the lens of our lives becomes dirty, muddied sometimes and when that happens, we no longer love as God would have us love. Selena could not love her husband because her lens was clouded over by her need for him to be at her side. Her fear and her needs clouded over the glass, making it impossible for her to truly see that her husband needed to die.
Anna loved her children, but she dirtied the lens of her life by letting her expectations and her attachment to her children become obsessive. She no longer saw them as unique individuals. She saw them only as measuring up to whatever she wanted them to be. It was their job to fulfill her expectations and when they didn’t she became more controlling and they became angry. It was as if she drew a picture on the glass and asked them to stay inside her picture. She really couldn’t see them at all, not as God made them. What Anna failed to do was to get her expectations out of her sight. She never simply asked herself, “Who are my children? What are they trying to tell me? How can I give my life to them?” Instead she worshipped an idol of prosperity, a vision of family that does not really exist and she thought she loved her children, but her love was crippled by her overwhelming expectations. In her desire to live the happily ever after, she was suffocating her children.
The people of Nazareth would have said that they loved Jesus. They had watched him grow up. He was their little boy. They were proud of him. And when he came home, they treated him with great respect and asked him to read the Scriptures.
When Jesus revealed to them that he was the Messiah and that the prophet Isaiah was actually talking about him, things changed a lot. The love that the people said they felt for Jesus became anger and even hatred. Because it was never love. It was attachment, attachment to something that was never truly there. They loved the dust on the window, not the true person who stood there right in front of them. They loved the image of the child raised among them, not the Son of God.
The people who we love the most are those who ironically are the hardest to truly love. Our love for them gets so easily coated over with expectations, attachments, guilt and other issues. We find ourselves not listening to the ones we truly love. We want them to be who we want them to be, not the children of God that God has created them to be. Fulfill my expectations, we tell them. Do what I need and want. And we no longer listen to the ones who we supposedly love the most.
I cannot tell you how many times I have sat in hospital rooms with someone who is clearly longing to die and their loves ones will not let them go. “Who is this about?” I will ask. “Is this love or is this attachment? Is this about meeting your needs or is it about meeting the needs of the person who you love? Is having them around really better than letting them go when you are causing them undo pain and extended dying? Whose needs are being met here?”
Sometimes the lens of our life gets so clouded over with expectations or fears that we cannot see the person we love at all. It is as if we are having a relationship with someone who does not actually exist.
There is only one way to try to see through the glass clearly in this life. The love of God must come FIRST, above everything else. Love of God must come before love of spouse, love of children, love of friends. If you do not love God above all else, all love will for you become distorted.
Love of God is like Windex. It cleans off the lens of your life. It burns everything off: your needs, your wants, your expectations. If you can love God first, ironically, you will love everyone else better. Jesus said it so clearly:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.
But you must love God first and above all if you are to have a hope of loving yourself or anyone else. You see, if you truly love God, then you are open to God as He is present in your Loved ones. You are open to the new and unexpected ways that your loved ones live their lives. You are able to listen in new and profound ways to their needs and desires. And the hymn of love that Paul so elegantly wrote so long ago becomes the song of your life.
Picture your loved ones. Picture their faces in your minds. We human beings are truly capable of no more than four or five intimate relationships. Who are they? See their faces. When was the last time that you REALLY looked at them? When was the last time that you pushed yourself to listen to who they are in a particular moment? Do you realize that they are constantly changing?
The people of Nazareth nearly killed Jesus by asking him to be something that he was not. Are you in danger of doing the same thing to the people that you love? Or is your love clean enough, pure enough, true enough to let them be? Can you wipe off the sins of your lives and see more clearly, even now?
Now we see through a glass dimly, Paul wrote. Yes, but we can work on that, even now. We can try as hard as we can to clean our sight, to see everything more clearly. We can try all the days of our lives to love God fiercely and purely, as Jesus did. For one day the veil will lift and we will see God face to face.
