At a time when many are arguing about love, perhaps it’s worth considering this virtue in a slightly different way. We are told we need to “love ourselves”; we should be allowed to love whomever and whatever we want in whatever way we want. We are told authentic love is all that matters and that each of us gets to decide what that means. But the chaos in our culture and the fact that society seems indeed bereft of love suggest that somehow we’ve drifted off course.

It’s hardly surprising that the body politic is perpetually confused about love. As we attempt increasingly to remove God from American life, we have also relegated faith to a system of silly beliefs and mythical fallacies. Who needs faith when we have facts? Well, the reality that many are suffering from a misunderstanding and lack of both love and faith suggests that each is essential to the other. Only in their reintegration, in fact, will the individual and the polity begin to flourish as they are called to do.

In his autobiographical work, He Leadeth Me, Father Walter J. Ciszek, S.J. (1973) offers us valuable insight about the relationship between faith and love:

Faith…is the basis for love; it is in the insight of faith that we understand the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all men. Love, Saint John writes repeatedly, is the one thing that fulfills all the commandments and the law. But prior to love, and bolstering it at the core, is faith; we must have faith before we can love, or we will surely end up loving the wrong thing–loving ourselves more than God, or loving creatures for themselves–and this is the meaning of sin. To increase our love, to love properly, we must strive always to increase our faith, and we do this by means of prayer and the sacraments (p. 192).

Without faith, Ciszek tells us, we will ultimately love in a disordered way; we will love wrongly. We know that as a society we are more anxious, sad, and depressed than ever. In this state we cannot love fully. No matter how hard we try, if we insist in fulfilling our desires and finding our loves in the material world alone, we will never truly love.

“A man of faith is always conscious of God,” Ciszek (1973) tells us, which is to say he is always aware of perfect goodness, perfect love (p. 192). May we contemplate the importance of faith in our own lives, and in so doing, reorder ourselves to love as Christ calls us to do.

Ciszek, W.J. (1973). He Leadeth Me. Image.