of the development of the seasons of the year, there were also
the feast days of the saints who exemplified the kinds of love.
We knew of the affection of the family life of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
We also came to know of the friendship between David and Jonathan.
Affection seemed special because it was a felt sort of warm kindness
within a family and you would not feel that familial love for all.
Friendship also seemed to be a special kind of shared interest
between two or a few and it could be quite exclusive of others.
In fact, in the seminary we were warned about the dangers
of special friendships in which two seminarians would spend
much of their time together and even want to exclude others.
There is a self-love in the natural loves of affection, friendship,
and eros insofar as I have a special preference for my child,
my friend, or my beloved and universalizing these loves with
agape and letting them give a felt content to agape was the
lesson of Jesus and what the liturgy of the Word was teaching us.
St. Augustine was a great example of sublimated friendship and
St. Francis was a beautiful example of sublimated affection.
In the way they imitated Jesus we came to see how Jesus
had a special agapeic affection for everyone, a special
agapeic friendliness for all, and agapeic eros for each woman.
We came to see how Jesus loved each person as having
an equal worth, each person as unique and each person in
relation to all other persons so he would even love each woman
with a special sublimated eros that went out to her uniqueness.
The liturgy of the Word’s history taught us of Jesus’ friendliness.
I,2.4 Nourishing Agapeic Eros in the Word’s Present
The liturgy of the Word taught us the history of many examples
of love that we should practice in the present for the sake of
a blessed eternity in which every true love will conquer death.
Trying to be celibate and get my eros sublimated into agape
was the main trial of my life for I still a few times a year
fell into mortal sin, and sex for some of us was the great temptation.
In our first year there was a handsome, blond, curly-headed
youth from California who told me that sometimes
even when he was going up to communion he had impure thoughts.
He did not return in our second year and must have decided
with his spiritual advisor that the celibate life was not for him.
My confessor in my sophomore year was Father Justin who
had previously been a rector of the seminary and yet again
told me as he listened to my sins that my lust and anger
were related as are the concupiscible and irascible appetites.
I must have inherited from my father and his example
the habit of getting angry and swearing and no matter
how hard I tried I would still get angry on the spur of the
moment at something that hurt me and use God’s name in vain.
The liturgy of the Word taught us a lot about eros for we could
wonder about the polygamy of Abraham and all the sexual sins
of David that are right at the center of the court history of David
and that brought him and his family the punishment of the rods of men.
And then there was Solomon and The Song of Songs, which began
with those words of a woman, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.”
When Father Bernard became a Benedictine he took the new name
of Bernard after St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Father Bernard
told us that he wrote over sixty sermons for nuns that were
based upon The Song of Solomon and that had to do with the kisses
of the feet, the hands, the mouth, and the breasts and somehow
the female within us was supposed to be the beloved of Jesus.
I,2.5 Nourishing Agapeic Mourning in the Word’s Future
The three great secret things that make their way into great art
are sex, death, and religion and the liturgy of the Word is filled
with meditation upon the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.
The history of art since the beginning with the Egyptian pyramids
and with the early cave painting and with all early literature
like The Tibetan Book of the Dead has had to do with the mourning
process that lets us help our blessed dead with prayer and ask
the community of saints to pray for us so that the very core
of spirituality is also to live in the world beyond the material.
St. Paul’s epistles which form a big part of the liturgy of the Word
focus most of all upon the death and resurrection of Christ’s body
and upon how we should live now to be resurrected with him.
The Hail Mary, which we prayed many times a day, ended with
those words: “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”
The eschatological theme of death, purgatory, heaven, or hell
was always there
