Original unity's reception of love

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, 

and they become one flesh. Genesis 2:24

     In the last Rector’s Forum we were considering “Original Unity” (notes here). I think as Christians we can somewhat wrap our heads around the idea of giving ourselves to each other as Christ has given himself to us, but sometimes how we receive one another is still obscure. But if we consider that God so loved the world that he gave us His Son, we recognize that people either receive or dismiss that offer of love.

     As I’ve learned from my Nashotah Ethics and Moral Theology professor William Daniel, in Christ’s economy, “every gift expects a return, or should expect a return. We are to give to those who cannot give to us, but this understanding of giving is to realize that, in receiving, the recipient gives herself to the giver and they are bound together as one. What can we give to Christ? As scripture consistently tells us, 'Nothing.' God needs nothing from us and there is nothing we have to give to God that God has not already given. So, what can we do? We can receive. What happens in the receiving? We are bound to the giver.” Likewise, when we extends God’s gift of love to others, the receiver is also “giving” in a way because they are offering themselves in acceptance of the other. The recipient of a gift is not inferior to the giver.

     Called to Love I believe elaborates on this experience in this way: “John Paul describes love as a mutual indwelling that enables each of the lovers to inhabit the other’s inner space. In The Jeweler’s Shop, for example, Andrew portrays his love as ‘a strange persistence of Teresa in me,’ a strange resonance.” Speaking of her love for Stefan in the same play, Anna exclaims:

Is it not too terrible a thing
To have committed the walls of my interior
To a single inhabitant
Who could disinherit my self
And somehow deprive me of my place in it! (JS, 48; Called to Love p. 41)

The characters in the play have learned how to receive another. When Christians receive love from God and others they then are better able to give love. As Benedict has said:

But if in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be “devout” and to perform my “religious duties,” then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely “proper,” but loveless. Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well (Deus Caritas Est, 18).

     As we mature we learn to receive each other as the gifts from God to us that they are.