Our Need for Need-Love

Note: The following was recently delivered at a luncheon for the St. Anne’s Daughters Women’s Ministry at St. Matthew’s Church. 

“Beloved, let us love one another for love is from God, and everyone that loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

Like C.S. Lewis, I, too, once considered this verse from Scripture to be pretty straightforward. I can still see the memory of adolescent Hayden writing on the inside cover of his trapper-keeper notebook after a youth camp: ‘love like God loves you.’ Simple enough, right? Then why did something so simple prove so impossible? Again, I can remember the brief existential crisis of online dating prior to meeting Christy. In particular, I remember one profile–suggested to me as belonging to a potential soulmate-level match–featuring repeated, emphatic claims that they “just had so, so much love to give.” Why then, when that should seem like such a positive thing, did I feel suddenly afraid?

Thanks to Lewis’ little book, though, I eventually came to realize that my repeated failed attempts to keep the command to love like God followed not from a failure to try, but rather from my misunderstanding what it means for a human being to love like the God who created him. That I was realizing how stuck I was at learning how to love was what made my discovery of Lewis’ book so liberating. That I felt so helpless to love was actually the beginning of my schooling in love. And that I was realizing how scared I could be by those who claimed to possess great love was where I began to understand how easily we can strive, in the name of love, for a kind of divine power that turns our good intentions into frightful outcomes. Rather than the God who is love, we can model our lives off of a notion of love that becomes our god. And as Lewis notes, “love, become a god, becomes a demon.” It is with the hope of avoiding that error that I’d like to focus our time here not on any of the ‘four loves’ in particular, but rather on an essential principle of love itself. As Lewis observes in the first chapter of The Four Loves: it is when we stop pretending to love like the God who loves us that we can actually begin to love like the God who loves us.

Lewis begins by pointing out the obvious difficulty in our command to love as God loves us: the fact that we are not God. Though some might think this is a self-evident fact, acknowledging this to be true and remembering this fact still takes some effort. Helpfully, Lewis subdivides the general concept of love first between the Creator and His Creation, assigning to God what he calls “gift-love” and to the creation “need-love.” Gift-love is a pure donation of the self for the good of others. It is the love that inaugurates a loving relationship before the beloved, the recipient of love, is capable of returning that love. It is the unmoved, Mover of all loves. It is the Divine Love. As Lewis describes it: ““Divine Love is Gift-love. The Father gives all He is and has to the Son. The Son gives Himself back to the Father and gives Himself to the world, and for the world to the Father, and thus gives the world (in Himself) back to the Father too.” Pure gift-love is the love God has toward all that He creates, manifest first in the fact that He creates it. God does not move to create out of necessity. No one comes along and forces His hand. He creates out of self-moving delight.

By contrast, Lewis characterizes “need-love” as “that which sends a child into the arms of his mother.” It arises out of a sense of necessity, of being small in a world larger than ourselves, one that we neither create nor control. Need-love is the realization that we need love, that our love for ourselves or the love arising from ourselves is insufficient without a prior love. Need love is the confession that our loves, as creatures who are not the Creator, are always kind of conditional, no matter how unconditional we would like them to be or pretend they are. Our loves are conditional not because we do not wish to love unconditionally, but because we are conditional creatures, if for no other reason than that we have been created, made by another for a purpose beyond ourselves. And it is in returning to this fact that our little loves can actually begin to take shape and direction, and only then can they encounter that true and unconditional gift-love from the source of love Himself.

Need-love is what frees us to love as those in relationship; first with God and then with those others who are also in relationship with God. This healing return begins with the admission that we need one another. This is not as obvious as we might think, or at least we often act like it is not obvious. How often do we praise the person who takes care of anyone and who needs very little care themselves? We see such “selfless” people as heroes because we believe them to be emblems of progress toward god-likeness, that vision of self-sufficiency. They are enough for themselves–so much so that they strive tirelessly to be enough for everyone else around them. We should note that this begins in the most innocent of ways, usually in the very real delight in showing care for those around us. The test of whether this delight has turned dysfunctional, however, is when it comes time for the care-giver to receive love in return. The extent to which they are able to do so is the difference between love and compulsion.

There is a clear, practical difficulty here. Many of us experience life in such a way that loving care is almost exacted from us. We could not exhaust the ways that women in our world are held to an extreme standard for showing love to others regardless of how and whether it is reciprocated. We could not say enough about how love is often stolen from women. In every occurrence of love required and not returned, of love unnoticed, of love taken without consent or dignity–we can observe a great injustice that grieves the heart of Christ. There are those here who perhaps love as a projection of ego on others, but for many more of us, I suspect, our struggle to acknowledge need-love comes not from a willful rejection of our creatureliness but rather from the depletion of our love by those who have used up our love. 

It is perhaps the case that this has led to the despair at which we might arrive when we wonder whether, if we were to need something, anyone would actually care. I am under no illusions about how close to the heart and painful this can be. To love, as Lewis points out, is to become vulnerable. And too often that vulnerability is tread upon. Yet the alternative to vulnerability is perhaps too awful to seriously consider; invincibility always comes at the cost of the self we are trying to protect. What then are we to do? As frightful as it may sound at first, we must begin to entrust ourselves to love again, knowing that our healing in love may need to extend far into the Resurrection. As Christians we are realists, and we know it may really require that kind of time.

Need-love, when it returns in us, returns to the embrace of God and says: I cannot love unless you love me. Need-love is thus at its fullest when we are regular in prayer. Love always begins with this worship to the author of Love. Need-love then assents to receive love from God in the manner that God has provided it: through the mediating community of others made in His likeness. God loves playing with a team, He is always making a people through whom to communicate His goodness. This is because God is eternally Trinity, a unity of everlasting relationships. It is the same for his image-bearers in the world. We should expect that any growth in likeness to God will draw us into deeper fellowship with others. Need-love receives the communally-mediated love as the gift of God Himself. It puts aside the tempting vision of a life lived ‘just between me and God.’ As good as that may sound, the pursuit of such a life will cause us to miss out on much of the way God regularly delivers His love. 

Our humility to enter into this necessary journey of knowing our need and opening our hearts to receive the love we need from God and from others. When we entrust ourselves to love on these terms, we will find that God is faithful to meet our needs. We can trust Him, and we must practice trusting Him. In practice, this is more difficult. As Lewis points out, growth in love as it actually is can be likened to a trail-hike down a steep canyon along many switchbacks. To attempt to approach home directly will result in our plummeting to our deaths. Instead we have to take repeated journeys away from what we know to be the ultimate goal, sometimes well-beyond sight of our destination. But if we stay on that trail, we are nearer in relation to home than when we first began, even if it neither looks or feels like it. To become more like the God who is Love is to draw nearer in relationship to Him, not to attempt to appropriate His attributes. The closer we are in relationship to God, the more we will love. We will find that our needs in love do indeed get met, and in the gratitude of those little contentments we find the freedom to love a bit like God–out of delight.

In the meantime, in practice, there is for us the journey of growing in relation to God, bearing with humility our sometimes embarrassing need for love. We must avoid the temptation to love others without being vulnerable enough to be loved. For the one who already believes they know it is impossible to learn anything. For the one who believes acts like they need nothing in love it is impossible for them to love. It is when we are willing to inhabit the greatness of our need that we experience the greatness of the gift. As the Lord said to St. Paul: “my grace is sufficient for you, and my strength is made perfect in weakness.” The Christian life is a school of love, and all of the attempts and failures, the fits and starts, the advances and regressions–all of these can be part of the curriculum that forms us, over time and through communion and community, to bear the privilege of being the image of God. 

“Beloved, let us love one another for love is from God, and everyone that loves is born of God knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”