Saints and singers agree: life is definitely all about love. But what is love all about? Ted Papa finds the answers of music and movies from the past inadequate on this question, and turns to Vatican Council II to discover the true meaning of love.

For those of you who are roughly my age or older, the following quiz will be a nostalgia trip. For those of you younger than I—you can consider it a history lesson.

Match each quotation in the first list with its source in the second.

(Answers are below.)

Quotes:

a.  “All you need is love …”
b.  “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
c.  “Man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of self.”

Sources:

a.  Ali MacGraw in Love Story
b.  Vatican Council II, Gaudium et Spes, 24
c.  The Beatles, from Yellow Submarine

Answers:

Not so fast … Before jumping to the answers, let’s spend a few moments reflecting on this strange juxtaposition of pop lyrics and Church-speak. It seems to me that there are three very important things our various authors tell us—each with major implications for contemporary U.S. life.

The first, of course, is that love is a very important aspect of human life—perhaps, as John Lennon suggests, the most important of all. The fact is that the “Fab Four” are in very good company when they intone love’s primary place. No less than St. John the Evangelist, St. John of the Cross, St. Therese of the Child Jesus—and even Jesus Christ Himself, all gave love the first place in human life. When it comes to defining what love is about, perhaps the Beatles, the saints, and the Son of God take different paths—but let’s not quibble about that right now.

Next, Ali MacGraw (opposite the bespectacled Ryan O’Neal, as you ladies no doubt recall): what does she tell us about love? Ali, unfortunately, makes a big mistake—and my recollection is that this very movie introduced the same mistake into American society on an unprecedented and tragic scale. Ali seems to want to tell us that love involves no obligations—as long as we feel good together, and about each other, then we are “in love.” If we don’t feel good, that’s O.K., too—true love is “grown-up enough” to let us each go our own way.

My peers (and those older than I) may recall the freedom these very words gave to so many of us, wrestling at that time with the place of commitment and love in life, to conclude that love really was something you could walk away from, no strings attached. Ali (or her screenwriters) may have simply wanted to coin a catchy phrase, but they unwittingly laid an indispensable stone in the foundation of our contemporary divorce culture. In the time it took Love Story to run its course through American theaters (this was before VCR’s), love was redefined as something requiring neither reconciliation nor perseverance through difficult times. On the contrary, the presence of anything resembling conflict meant that you were not really in love!

Which brings us to our final quotation: that of the Second Vatican Council. Most of us aren’t used to defining love as “a sincere gift of self.” Though some fortunate among us may have found this to be the reality of love, our notions probably still hover, like so many cupids, around valentines and emotions and happily-ever-afters. It might, therefore, be a bit surprising that the Church says that a man will not even understand who he isunless he loves—and further that to love is to give oneself away!

What examples can we offer of this self-giving that is love that in turn leads to “self-discovery”? Certainly high on the list is the day-to-day fidelity of husband and wife, through the joyous but sometimes torturous twists and turns of married life; those who are married know that “a sincere gift of self” is the absolute minimum requirement for negotiating these curves, and that the “curves” themselves, in a mysterious way, draw forth the genuine gift of self to one another.

Or how about the 120 Chinese martyrs canonized in Rome earlier this month? Can there be any more complete “self-gift” than to give one’s life? Did not our Lord Himself say, “What can a man give in exchange for his life?” Are not war-dead, and policemen killed in the line of duty, remembered with reverence in every culture—precisely because of this “ultimate gift”?

And finally, we have the example par excellence of self-giving love, the One who gave His life for the salvation of the world—Jesus Christ. If this is how God Himself loved when He became man, can we not find a lesson in this for us? Do we not find herein a clue as to the true nature of life, of love, of God, of human beings?

Perhaps the French poet Paul Claudel best sums up our point:

What is the worth of the world compared to life?
And what is the worth of life if not to be given?

NOTE: The answers are a-c, b-a, c-b.

Copyright © 2000 Ted Papa

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Ted Papa is serving as the Vatican correspondent for Christianity.com while he pursues his S.T.L. degree at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. He has nearly 20 years’ experience in Catholic publishing, including management positions with The Word Among Us magazine and Harmony Media, Inc., a Catholic software company. He recently completed a master’s in sacred theology degree at the John Paul II Institute for Studies in Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.