Growing in Love Takes Time

There seems nothing more obvious than the fundamental importance of love for our lives. We all want to love and to be loved. But why is love so hard? We are drawn to love within the ordinary circumstances of every day; drawn, prompted, but then sometimes afraid, paralyzed, or apparently just too lazy to respond. In fact, the call to love challenges our hearts to open up to the incomprehensible Mystery that sustains all of reality and is signified by everything that attracts us. 

We think we want love to be simple and “safe,” commodified, subject to our control, and if we ever think of "growing in love" it is usually only in superficial and manageable terms. We find it overwhelming when we consider that we are made to love the Infinite, that all the turmoil inside of us is the anguished cry of our being, the cry for this love. Even underneath our laziness is a kind of desperation to hold onto what we have, because we don't know what there is out there "beyond ourselves" and we don't want to take the risk.

But really, are you satisfied with what you have now. Really?

Another aspect of our hesitancy to love might be discouragement. "I have tried to love before, but all I've done is mess things up. I don't know how to love and I don't want to try. It's too dangerous!"

This is a moment where my freedom is challenged in a crucial way. I have a choice. I can give in to discouragement. Or I can acknowledge my poverty, and beg from the heart of my great need for love. If the Infinite calls forth my true desire, and if nothing less than the Infinite corresponds to my heart, what else can I do? 

We cannot master, conjure, or control the Infinite Mystery that fascinates us as the Source of the meaning and goodness of all things. Yet we have this inexhaustible desire, and even a kind of “expectation” that this desire—the underlying energy that moves forward all our aspirations and purposes and relationships—is not in vain. How do we know that we are not alone with an impossible desire for a love that we cannot achieve by our own power?

All we can do is cry out for help. 

And maybe it feels like a waste of time, because help doesn't seem to be coming. But that is not true. Look! We have already begun to grow. In that begging is already the recognition that the Infinite Someone can be addressed by our plea, and that we can hope for an answer. If we were really alone, it would never even occur to us to ask. Someone is already here, helping us now. Someone is already loving us. The One who loves us is calling us to a relationship of love, awakening our freedom by inspiring us to ask for the ways of love we cannot build by ourselves—the ways that take us beyond ourselves.

So we begin to love. And when we fail, we must not get discouraged. We must ask again, get up and try again. Because growing in love takes time.