Real love is given without resentment

In Exile

By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

This is one of the lessons of Gethsemane. The challenge of being an adult, one who helps carry life for others, is to give ourselves over in love, duty and service without resentment. Those last words are key: Real love is not a matter of giving ourselves over in service and duty, it's a question of giving ourselves over without being resentful.

This was one struggle of Jesus in Gethsemane. He was asked to give up his life and freedom for something higher and, like all of us, felt a fierce resistance. Nobody, easily and naturally, gives himself or herself over to the deeper demands of love, duty and service. Transformation through prayer is needed to bring us there.

We see this in Jesus: Only after having prayed is he able to say: "Yet not my will, but yours, be done." When he says this, his gift is pure. He is able to give himself without resentment to the demands of a love which will take his life. After his prayer in Gethsemane, he is able to do what he needs to do without the feeling he is a victim.

Jesus is victimized, but never a victim. When Pontius Pilate tries to intimidate him by telling him: "I can save your life or I can take it," Jesus responds: "Nobody takes my life from me, I give it up freely!" That translates: "You can't take from me by force what I have already freely given over out of love!"

But, it's not easy to say those words and mean them. Like Jesus in the face of the deeper demands of love and duty, we initially say: "Let this cup pass! There's got to be a way out of this, a way for me to become free of this." It's natural to want our freedom, to be free of burdens, of duty, of unfair circumstance. Nobody wants a martyrdom they didn't sign up for.

But eventually this form of martyrdom finds us all. If we are sensitive and good-hearted, love will frequently become duty, demanding circumstance and an invitation to sacrifice ourselves for someone or something else. Always there will be someone making demands on our freedom and opportunity: children who need us, an aging parent who has only us, family obligations, a spouse with an illness, a crisis at our workplace, a war we don't want, a Church that needs volunteers, and obligations of every kind that come from being sensitive to the demands of God, family, Church, country, morality and the poor.

The world is not divided up between those who are burdened by duty and those who are free of it. Anyone who is sensitive and good is burdened by duty. The world is divided up rather between those who are burdened with duty and are resentful about it and those who are burdened with duty and are not resentful about it.

That is very much the lesson of Gethsemane: What Jesus gave over to his Father in the Garden is not perhaps so much his life, since his enemies were closing in on him and he might have had to die in any case, irrespective of any willingness or unwillingness on his part.

Thousands of people die violently every day, against their will. There's nothing special in that. What's special in Jesus is how he prepared himself to meet that death, namely, by being willing to die without resentment, without putting a price-tag on it, without making anyone feel guilty about it, and with a heart that was warm rather than cold, forgiving rather than bitter, and large and understanding enough that it didn't have to demand its due. In the face of bitter duty, he took his life and his love and made them a free gift.

That's the greatest struggle we have in love. We're good people mostly, but, like the older brother of the prodigal son, all too often we nurse resentment, even as we do all the right things. That leaves us outside the house of love, hearing the music, but unable to dance, bitter. We need, at some point, to say: "Not my will, but yours, be done." If we say that and mean them, we will taste for the first time ever, real freedom.

(Last in a six-part Lenten series)

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