Love’s All That Matters ~ Fr. Daniel A. Lord

Love’s All that Matters ~ by Fr. Daniel A. Lord 

THE MODERN AND ROMANCE

Many a modern thinks pretty casually and superficially about romance. Love, he will show you in his novel or his drama, is really all that matters.

 Vast quantities of pulp literature every year grind out this simple thesis: When two people are in romantic love, when they feel this fatal fascination for each other, nothing else really counts. Love comes before all. And in a strange perversion of morality love is said to make all things right.

Regrettably a good many people are acting as if this pulp romance were a sound and quite reasonable philosophy.   Too, too many plays have in recent years followed the same theme.

IRONY HERE

 The more intelligent among the critics may note the irony in the situation. The actress who plays the love-conquered heroine has herself been married three times — each time for romantic love, and each time with less permanency than her last permanent wave.

The hero has been twice married and twice divorced and is at present (according to the columnists) imperishably in love with a third undying affection.

The author of the play is in court, trying to explain to a judge how he could have two violent love affairs at the same time that he is married to the romantic love that was so publicized in his marriage of three seasons ago.

I have shuddered often enough when on the screen I have watched the fascination of two totally unsuited characters. The heroine falls in love with a gangster, reforms him in the last hundred feet of film, and they marry.

In one film a fine young detective falls in love with a woman who by all the force of clues and plot is supposed to be a murderess. When he asks his good old Irish mother (a highly synthetic character, believe me) whether she would object to his marrying a murderess, the dear good woman answers, “Not if she’s a good girl.” I found that the most unconsciously funny line of the year.

NOT ALL IN FICTION

 I wish the attitude of “romance over all” were merely a matter of stage, screen, and fiction. Unfortunately that attitude is common in real life. We are, I repeat, a race of real romanticists . . . . and that powerful attraction of a man and a woman for each other is supposed all too often to justify the most unwholesome, outrageous and foredoomed lines of conduct.

Here is a girl who finds a divorced man fascinating. She gives up her religion in order to marry him. “Ah,” sighs the bridge club, “but they loved each other so much and for so long.”

The Catholic boy hesitated quite a while before he finally gave up his religion to marry the girl who insisted on marriage in her fashionable Protestant church.

“But,” ask his friends, “what else could he do? He was madly in love with her.”

This chap is a college professor; the girl “slung hash in the ‘Bowl of Beans’.” A microscope would find in them no common interest of language, education, or tradition. But because of a fascination like that depicted so terribly in “Of Human Bondage,” they married.

Anyone should be able to see the reefs ahead in such a marriage.

“But,” sigh the romantics who read the item in the newspapers, “what does anything matter as long as they have their love?”

NOT SO NEW

This attitude is not so modern as I may make it sound. We can read in history how fascination was mistaken for love and romance in the physical sense used as substitute for a durable foundation for marriage.

A tough old Roman general named Mark Antony, who had had almost as many love affairs as he had freckles on his forearm, fell madly in love with Cleopatra. She was already old and tired of her succession of lovers when Antony arrived. But that love became one of history’s famous infatuations.

When the crucial naval battle of Antony’s career came, he knew that by nightfall he would be either master of the world or a fugitive from the short sword of Caesar’s legionnaires. The battle was going not too badly, when he saw the warship of his timorous Cleopatra turn in flight. Promptly he ordered his ship about and raced, not to ram the flagship of his enemy, but to escape with his retreating lady.

That night Caesar owned the world . . . . and Mark Antony slipped from the arms of his fascinating mistress into the scrap heap of history.

A sentimental Elizabethan playwright (or was it John Dryden) made of that story a play called, with an eye to modern taste, “All for Love.”

Bernard Shaw, in his “Caesar and Cleopatra,” tells another side of the story . . . . how Caesar had once found Cleopatra fascinating. But Shaw is a great disbeliever in the all-for-love school. So when in G.B.S.’s play really important things come up — Caesar’s future career, his leadership in Rome . . . . the mastery of the empire — the great Julius gives Cleo hardly a thought; he moves past her fascination to the top ranks of history.

The girl in both plays was Cleopatra; the love in each case fascinating and highly romantic. But two different men were involved — Mark Antony and Julius Caesar — so there were two different evaluations of romance and two very different destinies and falling curtains.   Caesar had no silly ideas of love’s being all.

ROMANCE IS EXAGGERATED

I am afraid that many of my inevitably romantically-minded readers will think me Padre Lovekiller when I say that romance is much over-emphasized today.   Strong, pure, unselfish, stable young love can be a beautiful thing. Mature love grows in dignity and strength. A man and a woman who are consecrated by the sacrament knit their souls through trial and joy, creation and achievement.

The old, mellowed love of a man and a woman on their golden wedding day is an amalgam of affection and respect, of dangers known and triumphs shared, of lives that side by side grew into something vast and grand and noble.

But the physical love of a man for a woman or of a woman for a man, the fascination that can spring up between totally unsuited people, is by no means the only kind of love — if it is true love at all.

Let’s realize that there are all kinds of emotions that fall under the too easily used word called love. We speak of the love of God and the love of good food, the love of family and of work, the love of friends and of books, the love of scenery and of horses, the love of a hobby and the love of good conversation, the love of prayer and the love of sea and sky, the love of exercise and the love of sport, the love of travel and good wine and ripe tobacco, the love of peace and the love of the saints.   So even the most dignified and most beautiful love of a man and a woman is by no means the whole of life.

So can the quick fascination or brief infatuation felt by two youngsters be the whole of life?

Often a really strong and constructive love seems much like a background for life. It is an atmosphere from which a man moves out to great achievement. It is the shelter in which a woman achieves her more complete development.

Love may often be very important — when it is an inspiration that lifts the lover to higher levels and gives him or her new motives for virtue and creative living.

But there is something terribly unfair about the writers who make every life story merely a love story that presents the whole of existence as a concentration on that brief period of intense physical love and that presents the great objective of life as the search for and the finding of the right partner for romance.

MUCH ELSE TO OFFER

Life has much more, often very much more, to offer. A really perfect marriage is one that opens to both husband and wife long and inviting avenues for exploration and for their individual and joint development.

On the other hand, what might seem to the participants to be a predestined perfect marriage soon shows itself hardly satisfactory at all if there are merely romance and physical attraction.

Life, if it is to be satisfactory, has to be made up of a variety of elements; it has to satisfy the whole human being, body, soul, tastes, habits, possibilities for development, aspirations.

Even those of the fairy tales that talked in terms of “bread and cheese and kisses” put the bread and cheese before the kisses.   And quite rightly. Under stress of a romantic fascination lovers may briefly lose their appetites. But very soon appetite comes back with a bang and a bite; romance is not enough to fill a hungry stomach, cool a parched throat, or pay a rent bill.

As a matter of brutal fact the most romantic love and the most fervent kisses in these days of rising costs of bread and luxury prices of cheese will need to be supplemented by an assured income and a wise sense of budgeting.

The beginning of courtship should be slow and reserved that the girl may withdraw at any time without attracting comment. Before accepting constant attention from a man she should observe him seriously, and thus be in a position to prevent the full development of a courtship which cannot ripen into a happy marriage. A girl should not accept the marked admiration and favors of a man until she knows him well enough and favorably enough to accept his proposal. -Fr. Martin J. Scott, S.J., 1950’s

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