Man and Church
The Love We Overlook
On fasting and learning to love the family God has given us
For converts like me, the liturgy of reconciliation at the outset of Great Lent is always an intense experience – either one of intense discomfort, or of intense beauty. Every year, as we begin the fast, my priest reminds us that we need the forgiveness of everyone in our Church family whether we realize it or not – if only due to the sin of neglect, which we commit by focusing on those we know and love best. So, each Reconciliation Sunday he challenges us to ask, “Whom have I not taken the time to know?” How easy it is for us to overlook the simple sin of failure to love one another!
As Orthodox Christians, we tend to express a certain intensity. When we confront our gluttony, we resolve at once that we shall henceforth eat nothing at all until the sin is purged! Yet, it is the nature of fasting that we should begin, not with the attempt to overcome the greatest of sins with the greatest of virtues, but with a single step. So, even as we might hasten to express the fullness of God’s love – God’s agape – to one another in answer to our neglect, the fast asks of us that we begin with the most humble of loves. That is simple affection, or in Greek storgḗ.
As a convert, I also bring some of my past with me. In C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves, we find this admonition: “Almost anyone can become an object of Affection; the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating.” Lewis continues, “The especial glory of Affection is that it can unite those who most emphatically, even comically, are not [“made for each other”]; people who, if they had not found themselves put down by fate in the same household or community, would have had nothing to do with each other.” Truly, for the sake of loving those fellow congregants for whom we feel no special attachment, there can be no more fitting kind of love.
