The text of the Bishop's Pastoral Letter is on the Clifton Diocese website, here. I found the references to ecology as such less problematical. However, I had some difficulty sorting out what Bishop Lang meant in the following passages. The emphasis added is mine.
Today’s feast of the Holy Family reminds us that the home is a holy place. For most people the home is where we first experience being loved and learn to love. Loving relationships are what make us holy – whole people. It is in love that we discover our humanity, our true identity. It is in loving and being loved that we discover the risks of loving, the challenge to our selfishness, but also the way in which love sets us free and enables us to flourish. Like Mary at Bethlehem, Christmas is a time to ponder our loving relationships and grow in their mystery. Christmas is a time to say thank you to those who love us. .....
If we are allowing the “message of Christ in all its richness to find a home within us”, the life of love we live must not only be about the love we have for one another but also the loving concern we have for the world in all its wonder.
An underlying difficulty in these passages is the ill-defined meaning of the term "love", or "loving relationship". These terms can easily be read - and heard - with an understanding of "love" that does not go beyond feelings and sentiment. The statement that "relationships that we feel are loving are what make us holy" is clearly nonsense; and the idea that "feeling loving" makes us "whole people" is similarly a complete non sequitur. What I really can't get a hold of is the suggestion that our being holy may be dependent on whether or not other people love us ... that love may be a mediating cause, but the essential Love that we need to receive and cooperate with to achieve our own holiness is the Grace of God, and some of us will achieve that in self denial, perhaps in the monastic life. To define holiness in terms of our relationships with each other is always going to end up being inadequate.
Love, adequately defined, will refer to its inter-personal nature - that is, it is something that one person shows for others, and it brings about inter-personal communion. It will also reach beyond feelings to an objective wish for the best for the other person. And, in this context, to use the word "love" of both our relationship with other people and of our relationship with creation as if the two form part of the same life of love is misleading. The sense in which we talk about love of persons and the sense in which we talk about love of creation needs to be clearly distingushed as distinct meanings of the word "love", something that the pastoral letter does not do.
1 comment:
Isn't it amazing that +Lang had so much to sat about loving relationships in the context of the family, without once mentioning the Sacrament of Marriage?
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