Commemoration of St. John Henry Newman

Readings: Song of Songs 3:1-4; 1 John 4:13-21

Our two readings today seem to present us
with two very different kinds of love.
The Song of Songs presents a love
rooted in passion for the absent beloved—
a love for a particular other
for whom my heart longs
and whom I want to possess.
The First Letter of John, on the other hand,
with its famous claim that God is love,
presents us with a love
that seems not a matter 
of passion or self-fulfillment
but is a response to the generous gift 
of the God who unselfishly loves us first 
and call us to show to others 
the same sort of selfless love.
It is a love that is universal,
directed to all people.

When you go to seminary and get all smartened up,
you are taught to identify these two sorts of love
with two different Greek words: eros and agape.
You are perhaps taught that eros—
praised by pagan Greek thinkers such as Plato—
is egoistic, particular, and ultimately selfish.
And you may be taught that agape 
is the kind of love spoken of in the New Testament—
an altruistic, universal, self-sacrificial love
exemplified in the cross of Jesus
and in God’s grace shown to sinners.

 
But the fact that the erotic Song of Songs
and the agapeic First Letter of John
are both in the canon the Scripture,
and that they appear side by side 
in our worship this morning,
suggests that this contrast between agape and eros
is one of those the teachable bits of simplified truth
that your teachers feed you,
not in malice,
but because your minds are thirsting for understanding
and simple distinctions and broadly drawn contrasts
are the most effective way to slake that thirst.
These sorts of distinctions and contrasts
are handy pegs on which to organize 
your theological hat collection,
but they also tend to collapse under scrutiny,
and we who teach theology 
pass them along to our students
with our fingers crossed
and a nagging voice in the back of our minds
saying, “Well…more or less,”
trusting that our students will supply for themselves
the nuance that we don’t have the time to convey.

And this strategy more or less works,
because simply trying to live as a Christian
teaches us that universal love of God and neighbor
is inextricably tangled up with love of particular others:
our yearning for a spouse, a friends, a child.
My living shows me that the yearning of eros 
to escape the confines of the self,
to live ecstatically within the life of my beloved
and to have my beloved live in me,
is itself a kind of self-sacrificial love. 
It shows me that it is in my yearning
for this one, this particular beloved
whom I see here, now, before me,
that fosters in me love 
for all those others
whom I cannot now see,
and ultimately love for the God
whom no one can see in this life,
the beloved who dwells 
in unapproachable light.

John Henry Newman, 
whom we commemorate today,
and whom God blessed with 
the kind of supernatural common sense 
that is a mark of sanctity,
noted that we mistakenly think 
that the yearning we feel for particular others 
is a distraction from our real task
of loving everybody indiscriminately.
Newman thought this got things quite wrong.
He thought that our natural yearning
to love and be loved by this beloved—
this spouse,
this child,
this friend—
is the ground from which 
a more universal love might grow.
He wrote, “the best preparation
for loving the world at large,
and loving it duly and wisely,
is to cultivate an intimate friendship 
and affection toward those 
who are immediately around us.” 
Newman thought that St. John,
who teaches us that God is agape,
learned this truth from the very particular love 
that Jesus shared with him.
Newman says of John,
“did he begin with some vast effort 
at loving on a large scale?
Nay, he had the unspeakable privilege
of being the friend of Christ.
Thus he was taught to love others;
first his affection was concentrated,
then it was expanded” (Sermons II.5).

On this score, Newman can teach us something
about our quest for the unity of Christians.
As far as I know, he never expressed an intellectual regret
over leaving the Church of England for Roman Catholicism,
but he was grieved throughout his life 
by the broken friendships that resulted from his decision.
Just as love is always rooted in the particular,
so too is sorrow over separation:
“I will seek him whom my soul loves.”
Though high-level theological discussions are important,
what really drives the quest 
to overcome the divisions of Christians 
are not abstractions like 
“organic unity” or “reconciled diversity,”
but a yearning for union with the brother or sister
who was reborn with me 
from the same womb of living water;
a hunger to share with this one whom I love
at the banquet of the bread of life.   
Our desire for unity must be concentrated
before it is expanded.

It was no accident that, 
upon becoming a cardinal,
Newman chose as his motto
cor ad cor loquitur—heart speaks to heart.
For it is within the heart that speaks
to the heart of a particular beloved
that the voice of God resounds.
This notion that time-bound and particular realities
are the doorway into the eternal and universal
is what Newman called “the sacramental principle.”
The brother or sister who stands before us—
who evokes our love and yearning, 
whom we seek in the nighttime of our restlessness,
whom we desire to hold and never let go—
is the sacrament of a love that expands
to encompass those brothers and sisters
whom we have not yet seen,
to compass even the God 
whom we will only see
in the light of heavenly glory.

Let us pray that God will give us the grace
to love with passionate particularity,
and selfless generosity,
to love the distant through the near
and the unseen in the seen.
St. John Henry Newman, pray for us.

Preached at an ecumenical commemoration of Newman at Duke Divinity School Chapel.