Agape and Hesed-Ahava. David L. Goicoechea

friend, or my beloved and universalizing these loves with

      agape and letting them give a felt content to agape was the

      lesson of Jesus and what the liturgy of the Word was teaching us.

      St. Augustine was a great example of sublimated friendship and

      St. Francis was a beautiful example of sublimated affection.

      In the way they imitated Jesus we came to see how Jesus

      had a special agapeic affection for everyone, a special

      agapeic friendliness for all, and agapeic eros for each woman.

      We came to see how Jesus loved each person as having

      an equal worth, each person as unique and each person in

      relation to all other persons so he would even love each woman

      with a special sublimated eros that went out to her uniqueness.

      The liturgy of the Word’s history taught us of Jesus’ friendliness.

      I,2.4 Nourishing Agapeic Eros in the Word’s Present

      The liturgy of the Word taught us the history of many examples

      of love that we should practice in the present for the sake of

      a blessed eternity in which every true love will conquer death.

      Trying to be celibate and get my eros sublimated into agape

      was the main trial of my life for I still a few times a year

      fell into mortal sin, and sex for some of us was the great temptation.

      In our first year there was a handsome, blond, curly-headed

      youth from California who told me that sometimes

      even when he was going up to communion he had impure thoughts.

      He did not return in our second year and must have decided

      with his spiritual advisor that the celibate life was not for him.

      My confessor in my sophomore year was Father Justin who

      had previously been a rector of the seminary and yet again

      told me as he listened to my sins that my lust and anger

      were related as are the concupiscible and irascible appetites.

      I must have inherited from my father and his example

      the habit of getting angry and swearing and no matter

      how hard I tried I would still get angry on the spur of the

      moment at something that hurt me and use God’s name in vain.

      The liturgy of the Word taught us a lot about eros for we could

      wonder about the polygamy of Abraham and all the sexual sins

      of David that are right at the center of the court history of David

      and that brought him and his family the punishment of the rods of men.

      And then there was Solomon and The Song of Songs, which began

      with those words of a woman, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.”

      When Father Bernard became a Benedictine he took the new name

      of Bernard after St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Father Bernard

      told us that he wrote over sixty sermons for nuns that were

      based upon The Song of Solomon and that had to do with the kisses

      of the feet, the hands, the mouth, and the breasts and somehow

      the female within us was supposed to be the beloved of Jesus.

      I,2.5 Nourishing Agapeic Mourning in the Word’s Future

      The three great secret things that make their way into great art

      are sex, death, and religion and the liturgy of the Word is filled

      with meditation upon the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.

      The history of art since the beginning with the Egyptian pyramids

      and with the early cave painting and with all early literature

      like The Tibetan Book of the Dead has had to do with the mourning

      process that lets us help our blessed dead with prayer and ask

      the community of saints to pray for us so that the very core

      of spirituality is also to live in the world beyond the material.

      St. Paul’s epistles which form a big part of the liturgy of the Word

      focus most of all upon the death and resurrection of Christ’s body

      and upon how we should live now to be resurrected with him.

      The Hail Mary, which we prayed many times a day, ended with

      those words: “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

      The eschatological theme of death, purgatory, heaven, or hell

      was always there in the liturgy of the Word and we prayed often

      for the poor souls in purgatory that they might go through

      their reconciliation process and come to love all with no negativity.

      As the liturgy of the Word taught us more and more of the lost

      things we came to see how the theological virtue of hope was

      being strengthened by all of our prayer, for the Our Father

      brought us to pray: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done

      on earth as it is in heaven.” And the Glory Be taught us to pray:

      “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world

      without end. Amen.” And that was the pattern of our spiritual life.

      So we came to see that sex had to do with beginnings and death

      with endings and that religion dealt with both and the eternity

      that was there before sexual beginnings and our mortal endings.

      Of course, as a second-year fifteen-year-old student I thought

      a lot more about sex than about death and it was as if

      I was coming to mourn a sex life and family I could never have.

      I,2.6 Nourishing Agapeic Affection in the Liturgy of the Eucharist

      The second part of the mass that we prayed twice a day was

      the liturgy of the Eucharist in its offertory, consecration, and communion.

      As our teachers and especially Father Bernard taught us,

      the Eucharist makes history become present and our hope

      becomes so real that our agapeic love makes real for us

      our faith in all that Jesus did 2000 years ago and it makes real

      our hope in a future life with Jesus and all he came to save.

      At the consecration of the mass when the bread and wine became

      the body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus my heart grew

      in affectionate love as I prayed: “I praise, love, worship and adore you.”

      Adoration is a special kind of feeling that we might have for

      the baby Jesus and for the suffering Jesus and for God once

      Jesus makes God known as the love between the persons of God.