Last night I finally had an opportunity to see the romantic comedy Love Actually, which is a really good film that would have been even better were it not for all the lewdness. The US Bishops' review gave it an "L" for "limited adult audience," just a notch below "O" for "morally offensive."
The moral shortcomings of the film notwithstanding, there are a couple of scenes in the film that resonate with me. I'll only focus on one here. Early in the film, a stepfather named Daniel (played by Liam Neeson) is sitting on a park bench with his eightish-year-old stepson named Sam (played by Thomas Sangster). The woman whom they both loved, Sam's mother and Daniel's wife, has just been laid to rest, and Sam has been closed-lipped ever since.
Concerned, Daniel tries to get Sam to open up. For all Daniel knows, Sam could be having suicidal thoughts at the loss of his mother, or encountering drugs, or something equally awful. Sam finally decides to tell his stepfather what's going on. It turns out, Sam is not fraught with grief at the passing of his mum. Rather, he says to his stepfather, "I'm in love."
Daniel, of course, is relieved. When Sam catches on to this, he asks Daniel why. Daniel says, "I thought it was something worse."
To which Sam replies in an impossibly cute way, "Worse? Than the total agony of being in love?"
So struck was I by this exchange that I pulled out my pen and wrote down "total agony of being in love" on my left arm so I wouldn't forget it. I've been told that I have something of a one-track theological mind. I'll hear a brief exchange like the one above and my mind will race away on a theological tangent. That essentially is what happened for the remaining ninety minutes of Love Actually, which too often forewent later opportunities at great profundity in favor of slapstick bedroom antics.
"The total agony of being in love." It resonates personally with me because I know what the kid is talking about, as most men do I imagine. That principle of attraction that is so crucial to love, the desire to be with someone, with our beloved. The belief that our happiness will be realized if we can be united with this person.
But if Sam is at all like me, and I think he is, it is not only that. It is not merely the desire to obtain happiness for ourselves. It is the desire to supply happiness for our beloved. We see a person and become convinced either through fantasy or (preferably) actual experience that this is a person who deserves to be affirmed in a most altruistic and selfless way by someone who loves her. The desire then takes hold to be that person, the man who affirms the value of this woman. Then the total agony sets in, specifically, the agony of feeling powerless to do so for essentially one of three reasons. Either a) she does not know we exist; b) she knows we exist but has no clue how we feel about her; or c) she knows how we feel but would rather maintain a level of comfortable distance (i.e. she "just wants to be friends"). Can you tell I've been through all these before?
That's where the real pain comes in for guys when it comes to these prospective love relationships. It's not that I want to be affirmed myself and I'm not getting that (although that's certainly part of it). It's that I really believe I could love this woman and really make her happy and feel good about herself, but I can't because she's not letting me! She is choosing to miss out on me. (Trust me, ladies, this is what we guys say to ourselves whenever we are rejected.) And what I wouldn't give to just reach into her heart and make her love me and make her let me love her. But that wouldn't be real, because she's not a puppet, she's a person. I can't pull her strings.
All of this, you see, is a parable. This universal experience of unrequited love is one imminently known and understood by no less than the Son of God Himself.
Recall the phrase that started this theological tangent of mine. "The total agony of being in love." This has religious as well as romantic overtones. What do you think was the first thing to pop into my one-track mind when I heard this phrase? Why of course, the First Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary. The Agony in the Garden. What is going through his head at this point? While we may not be able to know the whole of it, we might approach it just by considering this so called "total agony of being in love." Because again, I think many of us can relate.
Jesus is in love with us. He wants to be with us, near us, inside of us even. And the most potent ingredient of that desire is not so much that we would make him happy, but that he desires to make us happy. Forget the shining-armor fantasies of mortal men: Christ knows for a fact that the only shot his beloved--that is, his bride, his Church, his sons and daughters on earth--has at happiness is complete and total union with him. Yet there he is in the garden, confronted with a world chock-full of people who don't even know he exists, or who know he exists but don't know how much he loves them, or who know how much loves them but want to keep their distance.
He wanted to find some other way to do this. What he would not have given to just reach into our hearts and make us love him and make us let him love us. But we're not puppets. We're persons, and he can't pull our strings. And what's more, he had no guarantee that any of that would change after he did what he was about to do. In fact he was fully aware that there would always be a sizable contingent of people who would insist on living as if he never existed, as if he never did what he did.
And it's not just the heathens. It's not just the Planned Parenthoods and Playboy peddlers of this world. All of us are at least in that third class of people, who knows how much he loves us but would rather keep our distance. We choose to keep our distance every time we sin. We choose to miss out on him. There's no person on this planet who has not at one time or another from one day to the next refused to requite his love. He knew this when he was on his knees sweating blood. And yet, he did it, anyway.
So then we are called, to love actually, as he did, anyway. I am reminded of the poem by that title from Mother Theresa. It's really quite a freeing attitude--and one that I saw a few times in the better parts of the movie. The best moments of mankind are the ones when we forget about what we might gain from our actions, whether our affections will be requited, and we simply love anyway. That is the "total agony of being in love." What indeed could be worse? And yet, what could possibly be better?
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