It requires no courage to accept the fact that the joy of Christ's love is given to us in the mystery of his Risen Life, which is now our life, and that the very meaning of Christianity is that we are to increase the life of the world, by giving this love to one another.
But when we go on to consider how Christ loves, therefore how we are to love, then indeed courage is asked of us.
We think of the Risen Life in man as a summer of Christhood in the world, a splendour of flower and fruit, a harvesting of love; and so it is, but not unconditionally. Christ has told us himself what the condition is; that the seed must be buried, must be buried deep down in the darkness, under men's feet, under the weight of the earth. That it must be subjected to the winter, to the season of frost and iron, of long darkness and short light. That it must accept the pre-ordained measure, the slow pace and long pause in the periods of growth. It is only on this condition that it can bear fruit.
It is only on the condition that Christ dies that he rises from the dead; it is only because he surrendered himself to death, that we can live the splendour of his Risen Life.
He has told us in words which can have but one meaning, that our love is to be like his: “Your love for one another is to be like the love I have borne you”: again, “This is my commandment, that you should love one another, as I have loved you. This is the greatest love a man can shew, that he should lay down his life for his friends” (John xv. 12-13).
“Like the love I have borne you”—we know what that is like; it is the love which was consummated on the cross. It is the love which accepted the Father's will which, in a mysterious, dark night of mercy, required the suffering of the Passion. Obedient love, obedient even to the death of the cross. Love which includes everyone, excludes no one, reaches from end to end of the world.
Such then is our love; it must accept God's will; in the obedience of Christ, it must be a dying to self, it must be given to everyone, to the whole world.'
Obedience means the fullest possible surrender to God's will, the acceptance of his law as the irrevocable plan of our own lives, so that all our emotion and passion and tenderness are strengthened, restrained and made holy by it.
In the fact of loving at all, there is for us, fallen creatures, an element of suffering. We realize the frailty of those we love, the million evil chances that threaten them. We are haunted by the fear of loss, of parting. By a strange paradox, falling in love brings us a new realization of our own nothingness, our helplessness to do, even to be, what we would, for the beloved. Only the sacrament of matrimony in which in a mysterious way God re-creates two as one, in his own love, can overcome this nothingness. But we live in a world that is de-christianized, divorced from love's very self; so marriage, for most people, involves material hardship and self-denial if they would live in obedience to God.
The lover is like the craftsman: he has to give himself to years of discipline, of patient work and perseverance, in order to attain his skill. There must be countless new beginnings, the exacting process of habit-forming, with its repeated denials of self, until at last his mind and eye and hand work in harmony on the material that he knows, as he knows his own soul. Just so is the lot of the lover, who has life for his material, life that sin has twisted, so that it is like wood that is knotted and warped. Yet on this material he acquires the skill that makes the craftsman an artist and enables him to fashion his own life into a thing of sheer beauty, and not his own life only, but the lives of those dear to him. Inevitably, in the process, he will have enlarged and strengthened his heart and mind; his hand will have become sensitive and capable, his eyes will be the trained eyes that see the loveliness of the world, that others are blind to. His home will be the little house that is built upon a rock, which stands fast when the rains come and the winds blow and the houses built upon sand are swept away.
