Article: Man, the Way of the Church -- Love, the Way of Man
CARL ANDERSON AND JOSÉ GRANADOS
“Carl Anderson and Father José Granados write with a clarity, beauty, and intelligence that make these pages a joy to read. But it’s the content that makes this book so important.” - Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M., Cap, Archbishop of Denver
Toward the end of his life, Pope John Paul II returned to the art of poetry and left us a kind of literary testament, entitled Roman Triptych, which weaves together essential themes from both his experience and his thought.
The first lines of the poem evoke a vision of nature: The pope describes how all of creation is in motion and everything strives to find its place, like "the stream's silvery cascade, rhythmically falling from the mountain, carried by its own current" (RT, 7). The poet even compares himself at one point to this flowing water, caught up in nature's rhythm and swept along by the tide of time. Nevertheless, he notes a crucial difference between a stream's descent down the mountainside and man's journey through life -- a difference on which everything else we say in this book turns:
What do you say to me, mountain stream?
Where do you encounter me?
as I wend my own way --
just like you ...
But really like you? (RT, 7)
Questioning and Wonder
So what sets man apart from the "silvery cascade"? The stream is borne along by its own weight, which carries it to the great river that eventually empties into the sea. But man is not content merely "to exist and follow his way" (RT, 8). On the contrary, man's existence is truly human only to the extent that he rises above the rhythm of the universe and cries: "Stop!" What distinguishes man from the rest of the visible creation is his propensity to step back from the cosmic dance and to ask about the meaning of it all: "What do you say to me?" (RT, 7).
Man's questioning is awakened by the spectacle of nature, but it does not stop there. The question man poses about the natural world spills over into a question about what lies in the depth of his own heart. Man's question about nature is ultimately a question about man himself: "Where do you, world, encounter me?" (cf. RT, 7) What is the meaning of my own journey through life? The stream flows on without asking why, but every human being can identify with Saint Augustine's remark in the Confessions: "I became for myself a great question."
John Paul II threw himself passionately into man's perennial question about the meaning of human life. The pope pursued the answer to this great question along the existential path of human experience. He was convinced that if we follow this path with the requisite insight, it will eventually lead us to the goal of our lives. As he put it in his first encyclical: "the way of man is the way of the Church" (Redemptor Hominis, I).
Admittedly, certain difficulties arise when we try to deal with the primordial question: What is man? Who am I? In the first place, we might wonder about the question itself: Is it really the first step on a journey toward the meaning of life, or is it just a riddle without an answer? Karol Wojtyla wrestled with this problem in the plays he wrote during his time as a pastor in Poland. Take The Jeweler's Shop, which Wojtyla published in 1960, two years after he was named a bishop. Here the future pope probes the meaning of married love as reflected in the stories of three different couples facing decisive turning points in their relationships. Wojtyla introduces us to the first couple, Teresa and Andrew, as the young pair ponder the meaning of their relationship, which is about to blossom into marriage. At a certain point, Teresa recalls a nighttime hike in the mountains she and Andrew had made with a group of friends years earlier. Teresa remembers being struck by the unsettling contrast between the harmony of nature and the disharmony within her own heart. Comparing the beauty of the world around her with her own interior uncertainty at that moment, Teresa exclaims, "Only man seems to be off balance and lost" (see JS, 29). In Wojtyla's Radiation of Fatherhood, Adam, who represents our common humanity, introduces himself by confessing a similar sense of alienation: "For many years I have lived like a man exiled from my deeper personality yet condemned to probe it" (RF, 335).
The question of man is more like the question prompted by a friend's gift than it is like a puzzling problem on a math test, because the question of man starts with wonder, which keeps the question from degenerating into some enigma coming out of nowhere.
Because it isn't easy to find an answer to the question deep within us, we are tempted to narrow the question's scope. We try to force it into a tighter, supposedly more manageable form. We reduce man's search for his identity to a problem we believe can be solved by diligent application of the techniques of the natural sciences. John Paul II reacted vigorously against this reductionism, which, in the end, denies the soul's true depth and so leads to the abolition of man.
John Paul's rejection of reductionism is illustrated by the character of Adam Chmielowski, the protagonist of another play from his Polish period, Our God's Brother. At one point in the play, Adam, a gifted artist who has given up painting in order to help the poor, converses with a stranger who claims that an abundance of material goods is an adequate answer to the problem of poverty. Although Adam certainly does not discount man's material needs, he answers the stranger by pointing out the inexhaustibility of human desire: "Man's poverty is deeper than the resources of all those goods" (OGB, 242).
"Man's poverty is deeper than the resources of all those goods." Once we realize this truth and resist the allure of materialistic answers to the human question, another difficulty appears on the horizon: The very depth of the question can discourage us from searching for an answer. After all, isn't the answer too lofty for us? Doesn't it lie beyond the reach of our native capacity? Mightn't our search lead to unending debates that never quite manage to dispel our doubts?
John Paul II vigorously opposed this counsel of despair. Admittedly, the great question of human identity is in some sense bigger than the questioner. Nevertheless, the question is not the decisive thing (just as the capacity to question isn't the chief difference between man and the animals). On the contrary, our questioning itself responds to something prior and more important:
What do you say to me, mountain stream?
Where do you encounter me?
as I wend my own way --
just like you ...
But really like you?
(Here let me pause;
let me halt before a threshold,
the threshold of pure wonder.)
The rushing stream cannot wonder,
as it descends, and the woods silently slope,
following its rhythm
-- but man can wonder!
The threshold which the world crosses in him
is the threshold of wonder.
(Once this very wonder was given a name: "Adam.") (RT, 8)
Man's question about his own identity, the pope is telling us in this passage from Roman Triptych, does not arise in a vacuum, and therefore it is no mere enigmatic riddle with no answer. Rather man's questioning awakens in response to an experience of wonder that precedes it. Wonder gives birth to the question about who we are, and this priority of wonder determines the very nature of our search for an answer to it. Let's illustrate this point with an example from everyday life.
Suppose you're taking an exam and a question comes up that you didn't study for. Since this unexpected question catches you off guard, you experience it as a frustrating puzzle you can't solve. But let us imagine a different scenario. Say you receive an unexpected present from a friend. You may not know why he has given you this particular gift, but your question about what prompted this act of generosity is totally different, because you already know that the answer has to do with your friend's love for you. The gift moves you to ask why, but the question does not paralyze you in the same way an unexpected exam question would. Instead it opens up new paths for, and possibilities of friendship. The search for understanding is meaningful at its very origin; indeed, the meaning is already there long before the answer comes into view.
The question of man is more like the question prompted by a friend's gift than it is like a puzzling problem on a math test, because the question of man starts with wonder, which keeps the question from degenerating into some enigma coming out of nowhere. Because wonder is not called forth by a lack of meaning but by an excess of it, the questioning it provokes has nothing in common with an abyss of sterile doubt that chokes off the stream of life -- like Hamlet's "to be or not to be?" Wonder assures us that there really is an answer to the question. Of course, it also tells us that this answer is not completely within our grasp. Yet this is actually a positive message, because when the answer does come, it will be even greater and better than we could have imagined. Instead of paralyzing us, then, wonder sustains us on our journey toward our true identity:
Man went his way ...
carried along by wonder!
In his wonderment, he always emerged
from the tide that bore him on,
as if to say to everything around him:
"Stop! ...
all this passing has sense"
"has sense ... has sense ... has sense!" (RT, 8)
At this point, we need to introduce a new term that captures that special quality in things that makes them wonderful in our eyes. This term is "mystery." Whereas in common parlance "mystery" means an obscurity that frustrates understanding, we'll be using the word in a much more positive sense that better reflects its original meaning. When we describe the world as "mysterious," our point is not that the world is inscrutable. Actually, we're saying just the opposite: The world is mysterious, not because it lacks meaning, but precisely because it is saturated with meaning. It's just that this meaning is too rich and full for the eyes of the mind to master in a single glance. Another way of putting this is that mystery is the calling card of reality; mystery is the ability to evoke wonder that is built into everything that really exists, no matter how seemingly trivial. In a word, mystery prompts us to question, not because there is a lack of clarity, but because there is an excess of light.
Man, Saint Augustine observed, is a great question for himself. Why? Because he is a great mystery that elicits wonder. Because man is a question that arises within wonder, he is not totally "off balance and lost" (JS, 29). He need not be discouraged in his search for an answer to the question that he himself is, because wonder gives him a "compass" for his journey toward fuller understanding. But where does man encounter the mystery that gives rise to his wonderment in the first place?
Love is the Birthplace of Wonder
The world is mysterious, not because it lacks meaning, but precisely because it is saturated with meaning. It's just that this meaning is too rich and full for the eyes of the mind to master in a single glance.
Many people today are in search of the mysterious, which they regard as a bulwark against enslavement to technology. More and more of our contemporaries glimpse that there is a mysterious depth to human existence, realize that it has been obscured, and are in the process of trying to recover it. But even if there is a growing consensus that mystery is the native atmosphere in which the question of meaning can breathe free, there is one issue that is still hotly debated: Where do we actually encounter this mystery?
A lot of people think that experiencing mystery means having some sort of mystical rapture apart from everyday existence. According to this mind-set, God cannot be found in the merely earthly but has to be sought exclusively in the depth of our souls. Unfortunately, this approach to mystery (which is fairly common in "New Age" circles) drives a wedge between religious experience and everyday existence. By the same logic, it reinforces the tendency to separate faith and life, which John Paul II identified as one of the biggest temptations facing modern man (see Veritatis Splendor, 26). The quest for mystery is a good thing, but not if it separates us from the world. For such a separation causes a rift in human existence; it turns us into mental schizophrenics who divide up our lives into supposedly airtight halves: on the one side, the concerns of the individual (religion and morality); on the other side, the supposedly universal concerns that make up the "real business" of our life in society (the realm of science and technology, politics and public policy, commerce and finance, and so on).
John Paul II offers a biblical contrast to this compartmentalization of man's identity. The habitat of wonder, he says, "is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' " (Deut. 30:12-13). We meet wonder in the very midst of our everyday experience. We have already seen that man's contemplation of nature gives birth to wonder in his soul. But the amazement we experience at the sight of majestic mountains or of the immense ocean is not the first or most important kind of wonder. There is an even more basic experience of wonderment. The passage from The Jeweler's Shop we quoted previously suggests where the true birthplace of wonder lies.
The context, remember, is Teresa's recollection of the beauty of a certain night in the mountains. She contrasts this harmonious beauty to her earlier relationship with Andrew, who would eventually become her husband. Although the two were together on that nighttime hike through the mountains, the immaturity of Andrew's love for Teresa hindered their mutual understanding. Here is Teresa describing her feelings at the time:
And I felt how difficult it is to live. That night was terribly hard for me,
though it was a truly glorious mountain night,
and full of nature's secrets.
Everything around seemed
so very necessary
and so in harmony with the world's totality,
only man was off balance and lost. (JS, 29)
At the time Teresa re-creates for us in this soliloquy, she was incapable of welcoming reality in a spirit of wonderment; she had lost her way, and even a glorious mountain night could evoke only fear, disquiet, and confusion in her mind. Teresa's recollection underscores that man's unique ability to ask about the meaning of life is inseparable from his experience of love. Where love is missing, the question of meaning lacks the air it needs to catch fire. Later on, when Andrew asks for Teresa's hand, this harmony of mutual understanding restores the balance she lacked on that nighttime hike. It makes her receptive to the signal of love, which is even stronger than the signals nature broadcasts to us through the silent majesty of the mountains at night. In a word, the experience of love is the birthplace of wonder, the first step along a new journey toward the fullness of meaning.
Where love is missing, the question of meaning lacks the air it needs to catch fire.
If we had to choose a scene that captures the essence of wonder, we might pick the moment when a child discovers the presents his parents have laid under the Christmas tree for him. Or the face of the mother who holds her newborn child in her arms for the very first time. No matter which picture we choose, though, the point is always the same: Wonder can be born only in the matrix of love. Even the amazement that fills us when we behold the marvels of creation makes sense only in light of the experience of love, as we will try to show in the following chapters of this book. Once again, the experience of love is the birthplace of wonder.
John Paul's message to us, then, is that the source of wonder is not far from our everyday experience, but that it reveals its presence in the experience of love that accompanies every person from the cradle to the grave. By the same token, our response to true love fulfills our experience of wonder and puts in our hands a compass to guide our quest for meaning to the goal of true happiness. "Man," John Paul II writes in his first encyclical, "remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love" (RH, 10).
Anna, another character in The Jeweler's Shop, receives a similar revelation. Although Anna is a middle-aged woman in a troubled marriage, what she learns about love applies to all of us: "Take you, for instance. You cannot live without love. I saw from a distance how you walked down the street and tried to rouse interest. I could almost hear your soul. You were calling with despair for a love you do not have. You were looking for someone who would take you by the hand and hug you" (JS, 64).
This passage captures the universal truth that love is the very substance of our lives and the revelation of our destiny. "Love," says Karol Wojtyla, "has the taste of the whole life of man. It has the weight of his whole existence. It cannot be a single moment" (JS, 60). The pope is right. Love does indeed touch all the dimensions of human life: It includes my body, my instincts, and my emotions, even as love flowers in a spiritual appreciation of the special dignity of the beloved and his or her connection with the transcendent Source of reality. By the same token, love is a guide that leads us beyond ourselves and toward transcendence. Love is thus the thread that reconnects the disjointed compartments into which modern man has divided up his life, and so restores the unity of which today's growing fragmentation increasingly robs us.
The experience of love is the foundation of John Paul II's vision of man. It is the key that enables him to address the human question from the inside and to take man's concerns and problems seriously. At the same time, John Paul's emphasis on love avoids the isolation and subjectivism into which our modern definition of experience often leads us. If love is the core of experience, then the latter can't be the purely individual and private affair we moderns tend to imagine. Love resonates in the depth of our soul, but it also takes us out of ourselves and ushers us into a fullness of life that is bigger than our tiny selves. The heart of experience, then, is the wonder awakened by the revelation of love. Love opens the very roots of the human person to the encounter with the other, to transcendence, and to newness of life.
Human Experience and Divine Revelation
Let's go back for a moment to John Paul II's warning against separating faith and life. All too often Christians have reinforced this separation by treating their own religious experience as a foreign body alien to everyday life. Some critics of Christianity have mistaken this caricature for the real thing and have complained that the Christian religion destroys happiness and spoils the enjoyment of life by teaching man to seek fulfillment in some faraway heaven.
Where love is missing, the question of meaning lacks the air it needs to catch fire.
This objection overlooks the truth that man's quest for his identity starts from the experience of love. If love is the starting point of the human quest, then man depends on a revelation -- the revelation of love -- in order to find happiness. Because man's quest itself begins in love, this revelation does not blindside him like a thunderbolt out of the blue. Rather human experience is open to this revelation, tends toward it, and is an expectation of it -- not in some future Beyond, but in the midst of our everyday involvement with the world around us. We don't need to escape mundane human life in order to experience love's radiance and light; we can bathe in its warmth right in the midst of our humdrum daily occupations.
Now, Christianity, like love, is a revelation that man can't contrive on his own. Moreover, Christian revelation, like love, happens right in the midst of our earthly space and time: ''And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). This similarity between the human experience of love and the experience of faith in God's revelation suggests a further step in our argument: Christianity is itself the fullness of the revelation of love. In the words of the apostle John: "So we know and believe the love God has for us" (1 John 4:16). The manifestation of love John speaks of happens in Christ's life, death, and Resurrection. This is why Pope Benedict XVI can write: "It is [in the contemplation of the pierced side of Christ] that our definition of love must begin" (Deus Caritas Est, 12).
We can sum up what we have said so far by quoting two passages from John Paul II side by side. In the first passage, John Paul describes man's need for love in stark terms: "Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love" (RH, 10). The second passage, a citation from the Second Vatican Council that recurs often in John Paul II's writings, sums up the core experience of faith: "The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light ... Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear" (Gaudium et Spes, 22).
For John Paul II, then, life revolves around the revelation of love. But the same is true of faith, which hinges on Christ's revelation of the fullness of love. So there is no opposition between human experience and the experience of faith. Rather, there is a continuity between them, and each illuminates the other. On the one hand, we cannot understand Christian faith without understanding man's encounter with love. On the other hand, the human experience of love points toward a fullness that comes to light only in the encounter with Christ. Wonder culminates in faith's response to Christ's revelation of the fullness of love:
In reality, the name for that deep wonder at man's worth and dignity is the Gospel, that is to say: the Good News. It is also called Christianity. This wonder determines the Church's mission in the world and, perhaps even more so, "in the modern world." This wonder, which is also a conviction and a certitude ... is closely connected with Christ. (RH, 10)
Leaving everyday life behind, or saying no to human experience and happiness, then, is not the prerequisite for preaching the Gospel. Quite the contrary: Christianity is the way of love, the answer to all of man's questions and the great Yes to his deepest longings. In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man), John Paul II taught that man is the way of the Church, while also insisting that man's way is the way of love. This way of love is in turn the path Benedict XVI proposes for the Church in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. The continuity between the way of man and the way of love also reflects the continuity between the pontificates of John Paul II and his successor.
Christianity is the Way of Love
In the first passage, John Paul describes man's need for love in stark terms: "Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love"
Our aim in the rest of this book is to substantiate the claims we've made so far about the convergence between human experience, love, and Christian revelation. We want to show, then, that love is the way of man and that the mission of the Church is precisely to manifest the truth of love in the world.
This task, though simply stated, is not without its difficulties. The first problem arises as soon as we consider the different, and even contradictory, meanings that attach themselves to the word "love." We use it to praise the noblest of sacrifices -- but we also use it to excuse a man who abandons his wife and children for another woman: "he did it for love." Clearly, many of us have never progressed beyond a rudimentary notion of love as an essentially selfish emotional rush. The protagonist of French writer Georges Bernanos's novel The Diary of a Country Priest puts us on our guard against the dangerous ambiguity that colors our talk about love. Addressing a person who invoked love as the motivation for her selfish actions, the country priest responds: "Don't use that word, 'love' ... You've lost the right, and doubtless the power."
But even supposing that we define the word "love" properly, we still have to ask whether our proclamation of its power to disclose the meaning of our lives isn't a bit overblown: Could love really be the answer to the riddle of our whole existence? Can we really say that love is the foundation of reality, the final explanation of history? Or is our enterprise in this book no better than a naive attempt to explain the meaning of life through the prism of a mere emotion? Aren't we in any case taking love too seriously? Doesn't our earnest talk about revelation rob love of its playfulness and spontaneity?
Our basic approach to these and similar objections depends on a key insight: The fate of love is bound up with the fate of Christianity. On the one hand, when we lose sight of the meaning and importance of love, we become blind to the presence of God in the midst of our experience, and we can no longer perceive him except as an alien intruder, or even as an enemy of human nature. On the other hand, without the light of God's love revealed in Christ, we eventually lose our ability to understand even the fullness of human love itself. If both of these claims are true -- and we hope to show that they are -- then recovering the connection between love and Christianity is the best way to answer the sorts of questions we posed just now.
John Paul II is a perfect guide in this recovery, because the late pope learned to love human love through his work with families as a young priest, and drew his rich understanding of the relationship between men and women from the mutual illumination of divine revelation and human experience. Following in John Paul's footsteps, we propose to train the twin beacons of love and faith on the path that leads man to the fullness of his true identity. Our account of love's journey in light of John Paul II's theology of the body will unfold in three stages: from the initial call to love, through all the obstacles that hinder our attempts to answer it, to love's final, longed for fulfillment. In the first part of the book ("Encountering Love") we will examine how love is revealed to us and how this revelation opens a path for us to follow. The second part ("The Redemption of the Heart") will deal with the difficulties we encounter on this path of love and explain how Christ offers us the strength to overcome them. The third part ("The Beauty of Love") will conclude the book with a reflection on how Christ leads us, whether in marriage or in consecrated virginity, toward the fullness of love in heaven.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Carl Anderson and José Granados. "Man, the Way of the Church -- Love, the Way of Man." Introduction to Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II's Theology of the Body (New York: Doubleday, 2009): 1-16.
Excerpted by permission of Random House, Inc.
THE AUTHOR
Carl A. Anderson, New York Times bestselling author, is the CEO and chairman of the board of the world’s largest Catholic family fraternal service organization, which has more than 1.7 million members. Since Anderson assumed the responsibilities of Supreme Knight in 2000, the Knights of Columbus have achieved new heights in charitable giving, providing more than $139 million directly to charity and 64 million hours in voluntary service in 2008 alone. A member of the bar of the District of Columbia, he and his wife Dorian are the parents of five children.
Carl Anderson is the co-author of Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II's Theology of the Body with Father José Granados and Guadalupe: Mother of the Civilization of Love with Msgr. Eduardo Chávez Sánchez, Postulator of the Cause of the Canonization of Saint Juan Diego. His 2008 New York Times bestseller, A Civilization of Love: What Every Catholic Can Do to Transform the World, was published by HarperOne.
Father José Granados is Assistant Professor of Patrology and Systematic Theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2009 Carl Anderson and José Granados
“Carl Anderson and Father José Granados write with a clarity, beauty, and intelligence that make these pages a joy to read. But it’s the content that makes this book so important.” - Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M., Cap, Archbishop of Denver
Toward the end of his life, Pope John Paul II returned to the art of poetry and left us a kind of literary testament, entitled Roman Triptych, which weaves together essential themes from both his experience and his thought.
The first lines of the poem evoke a vision of nature: The pope describes how all of creation is in motion and everything strives to find its place, like "the stream's silvery cascade, rhythmically falling from the mountain, carried by its own current" (RT, 7). The poet even compares himself at one point to this flowing water, caught up in nature's rhythm and swept along by the tide of time. Nevertheless, he notes a crucial difference between a stream's descent down the mountainside and man's journey through life -- a difference on which everything else we say in this book turns:
What do you say to me, mountain stream?
Where do you encounter me?
as I wend my own way --
just like you ...
But really like you? (RT, 7)
Questioning and Wonder
So what sets man apart from the "silvery cascade"? The stream is borne along by its own weight, which carries it to the great river that eventually empties into the sea. But man is not content merely "to exist and follow his way" (RT, 8). On the contrary, man's existence is truly human only to the extent that he rises above the rhythm of the universe and cries: "Stop!" What distinguishes man from the rest of the visible creation is his propensity to step back from the cosmic dance and to ask about the meaning of it all: "What do you say to me?" (RT, 7).
Man's questioning is awakened by the spectacle of nature, but it does not stop there. The question man poses about the natural world spills over into a question about what lies in the depth of his own heart. Man's question about nature is ultimately a question about man himself: "Where do you, world, encounter me?" (cf. RT, 7) What is the meaning of my own journey through life? The stream flows on without asking why, but every human being can identify with Saint Augustine's remark in the Confessions: "I became for myself a great question."
John Paul II threw himself passionately into man's perennial question about the meaning of human life. The pope pursued the answer to this great question along the existential path of human experience. He was convinced that if we follow this path with the requisite insight, it will eventually lead us to the goal of our lives. As he put it in his first encyclical: "the way of man is the way of the Church" (Redemptor Hominis, I).
Admittedly, certain difficulties arise when we try to deal with the primordial question: What is man? Who am I? In the first place, we might wonder about the question itself: Is it really the first step on a journey toward the meaning of life, or is it just a riddle without an answer? Karol Wojtyla wrestled with this problem in the plays he wrote during his time as a pastor in Poland. Take The Jeweler's Shop, which Wojtyla published in 1960, two years after he was named a bishop. Here the future pope probes the meaning of married love as reflected in the stories of three different couples facing decisive turning points in their relationships. Wojtyla introduces us to the first couple, Teresa and Andrew, as the young pair ponder the meaning of their relationship, which is about to blossom into marriage. At a certain point, Teresa recalls a nighttime hike in the mountains she and Andrew had made with a group of friends years earlier. Teresa remembers being struck by the unsettling contrast between the harmony of nature and the disharmony within her own heart. Comparing the beauty of the world around her with her own interior uncertainty at that moment, Teresa exclaims, "Only man seems to be off balance and lost" (see JS, 29). In Wojtyla's Radiation of Fatherhood, Adam, who represents our common humanity, introduces himself by confessing a similar sense of alienation: "For many years I have lived like a man exiled from my deeper personality yet condemned to probe it" (RF, 335).
The question of man is more like the question prompted by a friend's gift than it is like a puzzling problem on a math test, because the question of man starts with wonder, which keeps the question from degenerating into some enigma coming out of nowhere.
Because it isn't easy to find an answer to the question deep within us, we are tempted to narrow the question's scope. We try to force it into a tighter, supposedly more manageable form. We reduce man's search for his identity to a problem we believe can be solved by diligent application of the techniques of the natural sciences. John Paul II reacted vigorously against this reductionism, which, in the end, denies the soul's true depth and so leads to the abolition of man.
John Paul's rejection of reductionism is illustrated by the character of Adam Chmielowski, the protagonist of another play from his Polish period, Our God's Brother. At one point in the play, Adam, a gifted artist who has given up painting in order to help the poor, converses with a stranger who claims that an abundance of material goods is an adequate answer to the problem of poverty. Although Adam certainly does not discount man's material needs, he answers the stranger by pointing out the inexhaustibility of human desire: "Man's poverty is deeper than the resources of all those goods" (OGB, 242).
"Man's poverty is deeper than the resources of all those goods." Once we realize this truth and resist the allure of materialistic answers to the human question, another difficulty appears on the horizon: The very depth of the question can discourage us from searching for an answer. After all, isn't the answer too lofty for us? Doesn't it lie beyond the reach of our native capacity? Mightn't our search lead to unending debates that never quite manage to dispel our doubts?
John Paul II vigorously opposed this counsel of despair. Admittedly, the great question of human identity is in some sense bigger than the questioner. Nevertheless, the question is not the decisive thing (just as the capacity to question isn't the chief difference between man and the animals). On the contrary, our questioning itself responds to something prior and more important:
What do you say to me, mountain stream?
Where do you encounter me?
as I wend my own way --
just like you ...
But really like you?
(Here let me pause;
let me halt before a threshold,
the threshold of pure wonder.)
The rushing stream cannot wonder,
as it descends, and the woods silently slope,
following its rhythm
-- but man can wonder!
The threshold which the world crosses in him
is the threshold of wonder.
(Once this very wonder was given a name: "Adam.") (RT, 8)
Man's question about his own identity, the pope is telling us in this passage from Roman Triptych, does not arise in a vacuum, and therefore it is no mere enigmatic riddle with no answer. Rather man's questioning awakens in response to an experience of wonder that precedes it. Wonder gives birth to the question about who we are, and this priority of wonder determines the very nature of our search for an answer to it. Let's illustrate this point with an example from everyday life.
Suppose you're taking an exam and a question comes up that you didn't study for. Since this unexpected question catches you off guard, you experience it as a frustrating puzzle you can't solve. But let us imagine a different scenario. Say you receive an unexpected present from a friend. You may not know why he has given you this particular gift, but your question about what prompted this act of generosity is totally different, because you already know that the answer has to do with your friend's love for you. The gift moves you to ask why, but the question does not paralyze you in the same way an unexpected exam question would. Instead it opens up new paths for, and possibilities of friendship. The search for understanding is meaningful at its very origin; indeed, the meaning is already there long before the answer comes into view.
The question of man is more like the question prompted by a friend's gift than it is like a puzzling problem on a math test, because the question of man starts with wonder, which keeps the question from degenerating into some enigma coming out of nowhere. Because wonder is not called forth by a lack of meaning but by an excess of it, the questioning it provokes has nothing in common with an abyss of sterile doubt that chokes off the stream of life -- like Hamlet's "to be or not to be?" Wonder assures us that there really is an answer to the question. Of course, it also tells us that this answer is not completely within our grasp. Yet this is actually a positive message, because when the answer does come, it will be even greater and better than we could have imagined. Instead of paralyzing us, then, wonder sustains us on our journey toward our true identity:
Man went his way ...
carried along by wonder!
In his wonderment, he always emerged
from the tide that bore him on,
as if to say to everything around him:
"Stop! ...
all this passing has sense"
"has sense ... has sense ... has sense!" (RT, 8)
At this point, we need to introduce a new term that captures that special quality in things that makes them wonderful in our eyes. This term is "mystery." Whereas in common parlance "mystery" means an obscurity that frustrates understanding, we'll be using the word in a much more positive sense that better reflects its original meaning. When we describe the world as "mysterious," our point is not that the world is inscrutable. Actually, we're saying just the opposite: The world is mysterious, not because it lacks meaning, but precisely because it is saturated with meaning. It's just that this meaning is too rich and full for the eyes of the mind to master in a single glance. Another way of putting this is that mystery is the calling card of reality; mystery is the ability to evoke wonder that is built into everything that really exists, no matter how seemingly trivial. In a word, mystery prompts us to question, not because there is a lack of clarity, but because there is an excess of light.
Man, Saint Augustine observed, is a great question for himself. Why? Because he is a great mystery that elicits wonder. Because man is a question that arises within wonder, he is not totally "off balance and lost" (JS, 29). He need not be discouraged in his search for an answer to the question that he himself is, because wonder gives him a "compass" for his journey toward fuller understanding. But where does man encounter the mystery that gives rise to his wonderment in the first place?
Love is the Birthplace of Wonder
The world is mysterious, not because it lacks meaning, but precisely because it is saturated with meaning. It's just that this meaning is too rich and full for the eyes of the mind to master in a single glance.
Many people today are in search of the mysterious, which they regard as a bulwark against enslavement to technology. More and more of our contemporaries glimpse that there is a mysterious depth to human existence, realize that it has been obscured, and are in the process of trying to recover it. But even if there is a growing consensus that mystery is the native atmosphere in which the question of meaning can breathe free, there is one issue that is still hotly debated: Where do we actually encounter this mystery?
A lot of people think that experiencing mystery means having some sort of mystical rapture apart from everyday existence. According to this mind-set, God cannot be found in the merely earthly but has to be sought exclusively in the depth of our souls. Unfortunately, this approach to mystery (which is fairly common in "New Age" circles) drives a wedge between religious experience and everyday existence. By the same logic, it reinforces the tendency to separate faith and life, which John Paul II identified as one of the biggest temptations facing modern man (see Veritatis Splendor, 26). The quest for mystery is a good thing, but not if it separates us from the world. For such a separation causes a rift in human existence; it turns us into mental schizophrenics who divide up our lives into supposedly airtight halves: on the one side, the concerns of the individual (religion and morality); on the other side, the supposedly universal concerns that make up the "real business" of our life in society (the realm of science and technology, politics and public policy, commerce and finance, and so on).
John Paul II offers a biblical contrast to this compartmentalization of man's identity. The habitat of wonder, he says, "is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' " (Deut. 30:12-13). We meet wonder in the very midst of our everyday experience. We have already seen that man's contemplation of nature gives birth to wonder in his soul. But the amazement we experience at the sight of majestic mountains or of the immense ocean is not the first or most important kind of wonder. There is an even more basic experience of wonderment. The passage from The Jeweler's Shop we quoted previously suggests where the true birthplace of wonder lies.
The context, remember, is Teresa's recollection of the beauty of a certain night in the mountains. She contrasts this harmonious beauty to her earlier relationship with Andrew, who would eventually become her husband. Although the two were together on that nighttime hike through the mountains, the immaturity of Andrew's love for Teresa hindered their mutual understanding. Here is Teresa describing her feelings at the time:
And I felt how difficult it is to live. That night was terribly hard for me,
though it was a truly glorious mountain night,
and full of nature's secrets.
Everything around seemed
so very necessary
and so in harmony with the world's totality,
only man was off balance and lost. (JS, 29)
At the time Teresa re-creates for us in this soliloquy, she was incapable of welcoming reality in a spirit of wonderment; she had lost her way, and even a glorious mountain night could evoke only fear, disquiet, and confusion in her mind. Teresa's recollection underscores that man's unique ability to ask about the meaning of life is inseparable from his experience of love. Where love is missing, the question of meaning lacks the air it needs to catch fire. Later on, when Andrew asks for Teresa's hand, this harmony of mutual understanding restores the balance she lacked on that nighttime hike. It makes her receptive to the signal of love, which is even stronger than the signals nature broadcasts to us through the silent majesty of the mountains at night. In a word, the experience of love is the birthplace of wonder, the first step along a new journey toward the fullness of meaning.
Where love is missing, the question of meaning lacks the air it needs to catch fire.
If we had to choose a scene that captures the essence of wonder, we might pick the moment when a child discovers the presents his parents have laid under the Christmas tree for him. Or the face of the mother who holds her newborn child in her arms for the very first time. No matter which picture we choose, though, the point is always the same: Wonder can be born only in the matrix of love. Even the amazement that fills us when we behold the marvels of creation makes sense only in light of the experience of love, as we will try to show in the following chapters of this book. Once again, the experience of love is the birthplace of wonder.
John Paul's message to us, then, is that the source of wonder is not far from our everyday experience, but that it reveals its presence in the experience of love that accompanies every person from the cradle to the grave. By the same token, our response to true love fulfills our experience of wonder and puts in our hands a compass to guide our quest for meaning to the goal of true happiness. "Man," John Paul II writes in his first encyclical, "remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love" (RH, 10).
Anna, another character in The Jeweler's Shop, receives a similar revelation. Although Anna is a middle-aged woman in a troubled marriage, what she learns about love applies to all of us: "Take you, for instance. You cannot live without love. I saw from a distance how you walked down the street and tried to rouse interest. I could almost hear your soul. You were calling with despair for a love you do not have. You were looking for someone who would take you by the hand and hug you" (JS, 64).
This passage captures the universal truth that love is the very substance of our lives and the revelation of our destiny. "Love," says Karol Wojtyla, "has the taste of the whole life of man. It has the weight of his whole existence. It cannot be a single moment" (JS, 60). The pope is right. Love does indeed touch all the dimensions of human life: It includes my body, my instincts, and my emotions, even as love flowers in a spiritual appreciation of the special dignity of the beloved and his or her connection with the transcendent Source of reality. By the same token, love is a guide that leads us beyond ourselves and toward transcendence. Love is thus the thread that reconnects the disjointed compartments into which modern man has divided up his life, and so restores the unity of which today's growing fragmentation increasingly robs us.
The experience of love is the foundation of John Paul II's vision of man. It is the key that enables him to address the human question from the inside and to take man's concerns and problems seriously. At the same time, John Paul's emphasis on love avoids the isolation and subjectivism into which our modern definition of experience often leads us. If love is the core of experience, then the latter can't be the purely individual and private affair we moderns tend to imagine. Love resonates in the depth of our soul, but it also takes us out of ourselves and ushers us into a fullness of life that is bigger than our tiny selves. The heart of experience, then, is the wonder awakened by the revelation of love. Love opens the very roots of the human person to the encounter with the other, to transcendence, and to newness of life.
Human Experience and Divine Revelation
Let's go back for a moment to John Paul II's warning against separating faith and life. All too often Christians have reinforced this separation by treating their own religious experience as a foreign body alien to everyday life. Some critics of Christianity have mistaken this caricature for the real thing and have complained that the Christian religion destroys happiness and spoils the enjoyment of life by teaching man to seek fulfillment in some faraway heaven.
Where love is missing, the question of meaning lacks the air it needs to catch fire.
This objection overlooks the truth that man's quest for his identity starts from the experience of love. If love is the starting point of the human quest, then man depends on a revelation -- the revelation of love -- in order to find happiness. Because man's quest itself begins in love, this revelation does not blindside him like a thunderbolt out of the blue. Rather human experience is open to this revelation, tends toward it, and is an expectation of it -- not in some future Beyond, but in the midst of our everyday involvement with the world around us. We don't need to escape mundane human life in order to experience love's radiance and light; we can bathe in its warmth right in the midst of our humdrum daily occupations.
Now, Christianity, like love, is a revelation that man can't contrive on his own. Moreover, Christian revelation, like love, happens right in the midst of our earthly space and time: ''And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). This similarity between the human experience of love and the experience of faith in God's revelation suggests a further step in our argument: Christianity is itself the fullness of the revelation of love. In the words of the apostle John: "So we know and believe the love God has for us" (1 John 4:16). The manifestation of love John speaks of happens in Christ's life, death, and Resurrection. This is why Pope Benedict XVI can write: "It is [in the contemplation of the pierced side of Christ] that our definition of love must begin" (Deus Caritas Est, 12).
We can sum up what we have said so far by quoting two passages from John Paul II side by side. In the first passage, John Paul describes man's need for love in stark terms: "Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love" (RH, 10). The second passage, a citation from the Second Vatican Council that recurs often in John Paul II's writings, sums up the core experience of faith: "The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light ... Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear" (Gaudium et Spes, 22).
For John Paul II, then, life revolves around the revelation of love. But the same is true of faith, which hinges on Christ's revelation of the fullness of love. So there is no opposition between human experience and the experience of faith. Rather, there is a continuity between them, and each illuminates the other. On the one hand, we cannot understand Christian faith without understanding man's encounter with love. On the other hand, the human experience of love points toward a fullness that comes to light only in the encounter with Christ. Wonder culminates in faith's response to Christ's revelation of the fullness of love:
In reality, the name for that deep wonder at man's worth and dignity is the Gospel, that is to say: the Good News. It is also called Christianity. This wonder determines the Church's mission in the world and, perhaps even more so, "in the modern world." This wonder, which is also a conviction and a certitude ... is closely connected with Christ. (RH, 10)
Leaving everyday life behind, or saying no to human experience and happiness, then, is not the prerequisite for preaching the Gospel. Quite the contrary: Christianity is the way of love, the answer to all of man's questions and the great Yes to his deepest longings. In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man), John Paul II taught that man is the way of the Church, while also insisting that man's way is the way of love. This way of love is in turn the path Benedict XVI proposes for the Church in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. The continuity between the way of man and the way of love also reflects the continuity between the pontificates of John Paul II and his successor.
Christianity is the Way of Love
In the first passage, John Paul describes man's need for love in stark terms: "Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love"
Our aim in the rest of this book is to substantiate the claims we've made so far about the convergence between human experience, love, and Christian revelation. We want to show, then, that love is the way of man and that the mission of the Church is precisely to manifest the truth of love in the world.
This task, though simply stated, is not without its difficulties. The first problem arises as soon as we consider the different, and even contradictory, meanings that attach themselves to the word "love." We use it to praise the noblest of sacrifices -- but we also use it to excuse a man who abandons his wife and children for another woman: "he did it for love." Clearly, many of us have never progressed beyond a rudimentary notion of love as an essentially selfish emotional rush. The protagonist of French writer Georges Bernanos's novel The Diary of a Country Priest puts us on our guard against the dangerous ambiguity that colors our talk about love. Addressing a person who invoked love as the motivation for her selfish actions, the country priest responds: "Don't use that word, 'love' ... You've lost the right, and doubtless the power."
But even supposing that we define the word "love" properly, we still have to ask whether our proclamation of its power to disclose the meaning of our lives isn't a bit overblown: Could love really be the answer to the riddle of our whole existence? Can we really say that love is the foundation of reality, the final explanation of history? Or is our enterprise in this book no better than a naive attempt to explain the meaning of life through the prism of a mere emotion? Aren't we in any case taking love too seriously? Doesn't our earnest talk about revelation rob love of its playfulness and spontaneity?
Our basic approach to these and similar objections depends on a key insight: The fate of love is bound up with the fate of Christianity. On the one hand, when we lose sight of the meaning and importance of love, we become blind to the presence of God in the midst of our experience, and we can no longer perceive him except as an alien intruder, or even as an enemy of human nature. On the other hand, without the light of God's love revealed in Christ, we eventually lose our ability to understand even the fullness of human love itself. If both of these claims are true -- and we hope to show that they are -- then recovering the connection between love and Christianity is the best way to answer the sorts of questions we posed just now.
John Paul II is a perfect guide in this recovery, because the late pope learned to love human love through his work with families as a young priest, and drew his rich understanding of the relationship between men and women from the mutual illumination of divine revelation and human experience. Following in John Paul's footsteps, we propose to train the twin beacons of love and faith on the path that leads man to the fullness of his true identity. Our account of love's journey in light of John Paul II's theology of the body will unfold in three stages: from the initial call to love, through all the obstacles that hinder our attempts to answer it, to love's final, longed for fulfillment. In the first part of the book ("Encountering Love") we will examine how love is revealed to us and how this revelation opens a path for us to follow. The second part ("The Redemption of the Heart") will deal with the difficulties we encounter on this path of love and explain how Christ offers us the strength to overcome them. The third part ("The Beauty of Love") will conclude the book with a reflection on how Christ leads us, whether in marriage or in consecrated virginity, toward the fullness of love in heaven.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Carl Anderson and José Granados. "Man, the Way of the Church -- Love, the Way of Man." Introduction to Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II's Theology of the Body (New York: Doubleday, 2009): 1-16.
Excerpted by permission of Random House, Inc.
THE AUTHOR
Carl A. Anderson, New York Times bestselling author, is the CEO and chairman of the board of the world’s largest Catholic family fraternal service organization, which has more than 1.7 million members. Since Anderson assumed the responsibilities of Supreme Knight in 2000, the Knights of Columbus have achieved new heights in charitable giving, providing more than $139 million directly to charity and 64 million hours in voluntary service in 2008 alone. A member of the bar of the District of Columbia, he and his wife Dorian are the parents of five children.
Carl Anderson is the co-author of Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II's Theology of the Body with Father José Granados and Guadalupe: Mother of the Civilization of Love with Msgr. Eduardo Chávez Sánchez, Postulator of the Cause of the Canonization of Saint Juan Diego. His 2008 New York Times bestseller, A Civilization of Love: What Every Catholic Can Do to Transform the World, was published by HarperOne.
Father José Granados is Assistant Professor of Patrology and Systematic Theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2009 Carl Anderson and José Granados
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