I Delight In Your Delight – Learning To Fall in Love with Love

The Love of God that Christians are called to demonstrate is a love that delights in the other person’s joy and wellbeing.

What Do We Mean When We Say Love?

We use the word ‘love’ in all kinds of different ways. Saying “I love you” to my friend, my Mum, and my partner, all means slightly different things. If I say “I love my dog” and “I love my favourite pen” I do not mean exactly the same thing. We use love in different ways depending on what is the object of our love, and what form that love takes.

There is acquisitive love. This is the kind of love which is possessive, and which brings us joy through owning something or someone. This is a love which turns people into objects, and which regards objects purely in what they can bring to us. It is a love which easily turns destructive and abusive, and is most closely associated with the harmful types of lust. It is love only in the degree to which it is a form of affection.

There is erotic love. This is the kind of love which is rooted in our own pleasure, whether this is pleasure that we give, pleasure that we receive, or pleasure that we take. It is a love which is closely associated with acquisitive love. Erotic love is rooted in the lover’s own regard and own pleasure. It looks inward and is focused on the self, sometimes at the expense of the other. In its best expression in delights in shared pleasure, at its worse it turns the loved into an object of its own pleasure.

There is love for what is similar. This is the love we feel for people, places, ideologies, countries etc. which we identify with, which are like us, and which reinforce our sense of identity. Tbis is the love it is easiest to fall into. It is natural for us to love what is similar to us, and it forms the basis for the formation of groups, families, and communities. It is also the kind of love which is easily turned against those that are not like us. The different becomes threatening when our affection is principally aimed at what is like us.

There is sacrificial love, where are prepared to give something up for the sake of another person. This is the kind of love which willingly puts our self second to another person. Sacrificial love drives the soldier who throws themselves on a grenade to save their friends, and it is sacrificial love which means a parent goes without food so that their child can eat.

Sacrificial love is often seen as the highest form of love, because it lowers the self and foregrounds the other. But sacrificial love can easily become a kind of love which reduces the other person into an object or our own good intentions. It reduces other people’s agency and subjects them to our decisions. We can end up becoming ‘white knights’ rather than someone who supports the other. Sacrificial love easily becomes a form of self-aggrandisement hidden as self-sacrifice.

Caritas – Love that Delights in Others Joy

For Augustine, the greatest form of love is what he called Caritas. This has often been translated as charity, but this fails to take into account what is actually being expressed. Caritas is a kind of love which is passionately committed to the wellbeing and good of the neighbour, whilst being uninterested in reward for doing so. Caritas is love which is directed towards that which is different from us rather than only being for what is similar to us. Caritas refuses to let the subject of our love become an object of our desire, because Caritas desires only one thing. The good of the other.

Augustine says that when we know this love, we become in love with loving. We take delight in the beloved’s delight. We desire their joy, even if their joy is something that we don’t understand or something that we would prefer they do differently. As we learn to love with Caritas, we learn to find and seek the joy of the people that we love, and to take delight in their happiness. In this sense, it is not a selfish or aquisitive love but a love which is rooted in the commitment for freedom for the lover and the loved.

However, we always have to hold Caritas in tension with the love that God has for us. We learn to demonstrate Caritas to others because we learn to accept God’s Caritas towards us. When we know ourselves loved and cherished by God, then while we delight in the delight of our beloved, we will not accept their delight in hurting or injuring us. We will give them space to find and know their joy, and take joy in their joy, but we will also exercise our responsibility for our own happiness and delight. Not at the expense of the other, but by removing ourselves from that relationship of love of it becomes one which is destructive.

Love That Seeks Our Flourishing Together

A relationship formed in Caritas is one which flourishes in mutuality. When only person can take genuine delight in the other’s delight, and their beloved is still rooted in a love which is rooted in their own pleasures and desires and not mutual attention to the delight of the other, then the relationship will ultimately be destructive and open to abuse.

Caritas takes courage and commitment to work well. Courage to allow the other to seek what brings them joy while trusting them to allow us to seek our joy. The commitment to mutuality and attention between the loved and the beloved which ensures that Caritas is constructive and not destructive.

Caritas is perhaps the hardest kind of love to form and dwell within, but it is also the only kind of love that can set us free from self interest and give us the freedom to love the neighbour as they are and not as we desire them to be. It is the kind of love that allows relationships of deep trust and attention to form, and which removes possessive and acquisitive desires from a relationship.

Caritas is the kind of love that Christ shows to us. For Christ delights in our delight, God created everything for the simple pleasure of creation, and we know God through the generous and gracious love of the Holy Spirit.

So as Christ has loved us and takes delight in our delight, so we are to learn how to take delight in the delight of the people we love.

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