Active Love

I wrote this speech for my graduation a couple weeks ago and wanted to share it again because this is something that I need to remember.

Active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one's life, provided it does not take long but is soon over as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.

--Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Through this Fr. Zosima reveals to Alyosha that it is not through immediate action but through work and perseverance that we fully love. The love that Zosima and Alyosha show is unconditional. Peter Kreeft, a modern philosopher and apologist, writes that “[love's] object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging.”

Yet Alyosha loves all of those around him individually. His father, Fyodor Pavlovich remarks that Alyosha alone does not judge him for his wicked ways. Similarly Alyosha, who struggles with his own temptations, loves his profligate brother Mitya, his doubting brother Ivan, a low woman, a silly girl, and a bunch of rowdy schoolboys. Some, like Fyodor and Mitya are the stinking while others such as Grushenka and Ivan are those unknowingly begging for reassurance and love. Alyosha loves all of them out of the abundance revealed to him by his elder Zosima, and ultimately by Christ.

His love for each brings them to a place where they must embrace or reject the love offered to them. Ivan only comes to love individual people after experiencing great trials; by the end of the novel, Ivan may have glimpsed the necessity of the all-encompassing love of Zosima, Alyosha, and the God he has doubted when he picks up a freezing peasant and carries him home on his back. Each individual comes to some such realization by the end of the novel. Dostoevsky does not reveal whether they will fully embrace this self-sacrificial love, but but it is clear, that having been moved by love, they must respond one way or the other.

So we also must respond. We have been loved and so we must love. We cannot love humanity in general but we must love people specifically. We experience this when a mentor or a friend touches our lives as Alyosha did with a quiet love fueled by love of Christ. My mentors have inspired me most, not by giving me advice or by doing great things, but by loving Christ and by loving me as I am.

Loving words, compassion, and a faithful life, even more than “great deeds,” have a profound effect on us all. Small acts, which we might disregard as insignificant details, shape our lives, and likewise our actions impact others in ways we cannot always fathom. Many sermons or seminars could not have prepared me to give myself to others as much as seeing one woman give herself to Christ. It is not easy, but we are called to this love. Peter Kreeft writes “There can be no button to push for sanctity, any more than for love. For sanctity is simply love: loving God with all your soul and mind and strength. How do you love? You just do it. A cause cannot produce an effect greater than itself. And nothing in the world is greater than sanctity, nothing greater than love.”