Christmas Love

This painting, The Sacred Heart of Jesus, is by Salvador Dali . I'd never seen it before but found it while searching for an image of Christ's love to illustrate this post. The strength and focus, the raw humanity of his divine heart-for-us is what struck me. This is certainly not the infant Christ but definitely the Christ of self-emptying love whose heart was crucified for us.

I've quoted several times in the last week from Caryll Houselander's writings. The following is a lengthier passage from The Passion of the Infant Christ (p. 47) as found in A Child in Winter (p. 112), edited by Thomas Hoffman. While we all easily associate the Christmas season with love, we might do well to reflect on what we mean by love in terms of our faith. Houselander leads us in a good direction.

There is nothing more mysterious than infancy; nothing so small and yet so imperious. The infancy of Christ has opened a way by which we too can surrender the self to him absolutely, without putting too much pressure on our weak human nature. Before a child is born the question which everyone asks is, "What can I give this child?" When the child is born, the child rejects every gift that is not the gift of self; everything that is not disinterested love. The child rejects everything but that, because that is the only thing the child can receive.

Disinterested --not one-sided-- love. One-sided love is never a consummated love, never a communion. It is a disintegrating, destructive thing. But disinterested love, objective love without conscious self-interest, is as near to perfection as anything human can be.

Love that can truly be described as disinterested, free from selfish motive or interest, is love of a high order, indeed of the highest order. Rare is human love so pure but just so is God's unconditional love for us, revealed in the self-emptying of Jesus whose love is the model for our own. There was not, there is not a trace of self-interest in Christ's love for his beloved: for each and for all of us.

How have the Advent and Christmas seasons called us live more deeply, more faithfully the disinterested love of Jesus, born to us a Savior in the poverty of his Bethlehem beginnings?