To Grow is to Love
The self cannot be itself if it does not grow, and for a creature made in the image of God to grow is to love. No living being can be static.
The shelf cannot be preserved in amber. Every new act of love requires detachment from what is outgrown, what serves merely to infantilize us. Karlfried Durckheim used to insist: "You never kill the ego, you only find that it lives in a larger house than you thought." The self, if it to become itself, must find a larger house to dwell in than the house where everyone coddles us and responds to our whims. The passage from leaving home to entering marriage is the archetypal transition from the comfortable cared-for self to the strenuous, caring-for self.
Self-love is obsessed with keeping what it has and adding a little more of the same. That is why it is so boring, There is never anything new to say, nothing new to discover. Self-love assesses its position by what it has and is panicked at the thought of losing any of it. Forced into new relationships, into new situations, its first consideration is not of new fields for love but of the appalling prospects of loss. So it clings. It holds. And it whines.
The detachment that prerequisite for mature marriage prepares us for maturity in love across the board. We outlive our past over and over again, There comes a moment when I am no longer a spouse, I am no longer a parent, I am no longer employed, I am no longer healthy. There are period of my life that are immensely valuable and enjoyable and useful but which by their very nature cannot be perpetuated. Ironically, if we try to perpetuate them in the name of love, we ruin love.
Detachment is not disloyalty; it is a requirement for the next movement of love, which is a movement into more perfect love. Such movements almost always begin in feelings of loss, of deprivation. But detachment is not loss--it is a precondition for fresh creativity.
"Well-meaning family members can be your owrst enmies. If you prefer father ot mother over me, you don't deserve me. If you preferson or daughter over me, you don't deserve me."
"If you don't go all the way with me, through thick and thin, you don't deserve me. If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll ever find yourself. But if you forget about yourslef and look to me, you'll find both yourslef and me."
MATTHEW 10:36-39
