Generous, Jealous Love

Author: Andrew Comiskey
May 27, 2019
‘Do not give in to the feelings of guilt that assail you because you are not living up to the ideal you have set for yourself. I do not ask you to be faithful to an ideal. I ask you only to be My friend and to live at very moment in the grace of My divine friendship.’ In Sinu Jesu

Aging isn’t making me better. I naturally feel more outrage and less mercy for the moral atrocities that surround me. And that proliferate every June, LGBT+ Pride Month. Some are silly, like the ad I received from my airline: ‘All routes lead to love at United: Follow your heart and travel to Pride—grab a seat for a special drag queen bottomless brunch’ with United employees after ‘gay’ parading throughout its big city hubs. More serious is this year’s federal Equality Act which sailed through the House of Reps in route to the Senate and basically overhauls our federal civil rights framework by making female impersonators and the like a protected ‘class’ on par with immutable, involuntary characteristics like birth gender, age, and race.

All of these faux justices invoke love as their driving force. But doesn’t love have to answer to reality, namely the truth of who and what persons are? Love must answer this question: am I authentically seeking another’s good? If I am, then I cannot deny another’s human design and the Designer who made him or her in His image and who chose to reveal something of Himself in that person’s male or female personhood. If I agree with another’s misbegotten identification, I am actually not loving him or her well at all, but rather confirming a falsehood. I agree to deface that one, even if that one hates my disagreement with him or her.

God is love; His loving gaze is ever true. But frankly, my sight is becoming a squint. I can seek another’s good very badly. So I have been spending some time in the book of James repenting unto God’s heart for those He loves who have been hoodwinked by one of the greatest delusions of our day. As I sought Him, I came across this verse that I had never quite seen before: ‘Or do you think that the Scripture says without reason that the Spirit He caused to live in us longs jealously for us?’ (James 4:5).

What? You long for me, O God? You are actually intensely jealous for me to just be still and welcome Your love? Is that the longing of Your heart, a divine ache that can only be satisfied by me opening my heart to You, best I can? All You want of me is to be loved by You? All of the sudden I realized that I didn’t have to pray wearily for the right attitude or words or ‘feelings’ of love for LGBT+ friends. Rather, I needed to race into the merciful heart of Jesus and just be loved. There alone is generous love, a love aimed at the very depths of me. So I have been positioning myself before this Jesus who overflows with love for me.

Only divine love can fill the gaps into which truth has sunk. It will rise again as Mercy refills my foundations.

Truth must arise. Pride Month provokes it. May our authentic vision and love for the fractured flow out of intimate communion with the God who made us and who longs to convert us. He does so by joining us to Himself in an achingly tender bond of love, through ‘the Spirit that longs jealously for us’. May we seek out others with a similar tenderness that aches only for their good.
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