These Holy-Days: Brave Enough for Love

Last updated on: November 27, 2015 at 9:58 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

These Holy-Days: Brave Enough for Love 2015-11-27T21:58:00-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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This Thanksgiving, this Advent, this Christmas let’s be brave enough for love. Forget mere sappiness: the martyrs in Syria love without a trace of false sentiment. The great cathedrals were built with a love tough enough to sweat and sacrifice over generations to create beauty. Love requires courage. Love can work stone, shape rock, and raise lead spires into the sky.

These Holy Days should remind us to be brave enough for love.

This is a theme in the greatest of English novels, Jane Eyre. The musical Jane Eyre sets the theme to song in Brave Enough for Love.

ROCHESTER, JANE AND ENSEMBLE
I will never lose faith
I will never lose heart
For you have restored my trust
And I know you’re afraid
I’m as scared as you are
But willing to be brave
Brave enough for love!
I will never lose faith
I will never lose heart
For you have restored my trust
And I know you’re afraid
I’m as scared as you are
But willing to be brave
Brave enough for love

Real love is not soft. Real love required Socrates to give up his life rather than betray philosophy and Athens. Real love risks rejection rather than break the laws of nature and of nature’s God. Real love thinks, is prudent, and then risks the entire world for the Beloved when it is meet and right so to do.

Real love never loses faith. Christian faith is not believing in the Beloved despite the evidence or against reason. Faith is hope with substance and the lover acts on faith, not just hope.

Hope can trick us and certainty never happens. As a result, if we act just on our hopes, we will too often be hurt and cheated and if we wait for certainty, then we will never love at all. Instead, faith looks at the laws of nature, of God, and the character of the Beloved and then dares to love. Faith tells love that all the world might be lost, but the Beloved is waiting.

Love will be brave enough to cast aside power, position, privilege for the one loved. Love is brave, because love is neither rash nor cowardly. The rash rush in and are ripped off. The cowardly wait for a love that costs nothing and discover such love cannot exist in a broken world.

Real love never loses heart. Lovers want each other and nothing can stand in the way of licit love. If God joins together, nothing can put asunder. Some loves are a cheat, directed at the wrong object for the wrong reasons and that love will consume the heart. Real love is blessed of God, because it is an overflow of God’s love for us and is stronger than circumstances.

Death cannot end love and so we never lose heart.

Real love has trust even in the middle of fear. Perfect love casts out all fear, because when lovers know they have each other nothing else matters. All that the opponent can do is steal, rob, kill, and destroy, but reason and justice guarantee that no licit love will ever be lost. All loves will be regained in the Last Day and perfected.

We are afraid, but the more we love, the less we are afraid. Courage is the virtue that a good person has to seek the Beloved. We can make stone pierce the sky for the love of God and turn sand, lead, and paint into stained glass for the love of his servants, the saints. Love can accomplish anything given to humankind to accomplish, but love will require courage in a broken world.

God, help us to be brave enough for love.

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