A Higher Love
I’ve always been a little obsessed with romance. As a lonely child, and later a lonely young adult, I used love stories to escape from my struggles to connect with my peers and the ensuing sense of isolation. Who needs friends or dates, when you can vicariously experience falling in love and living happily ever after in every film you watch or book you read? Books were my particular drug of choice: my parents decided to raise us without a TV in the house, and so I was always an avid reader, even from a very young age. I read very widely – classics, historical fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, and on, and on – so perhaps from an external perspective, my romantic obsession might not have been obvious. But no matter what I read, I always focussed on the romantic relationships to the exclusion of all else. I didn’t care, really, whether what I read was well-written literature or cheesy trash, so long as there was a couple I could identify with and follow to a happy ending.
A skewed perspective
In hindsight, this was a distorted, limited view of reality. There’s obviously more to life (and art) than romantic love. There’s even more to love itself: the love that exists between friends and family members is just as real as the affection that exists between romantic lovers. However, platonic and familial forms of love never set my imagination alight the way romantic love did – and I most certainly wasn’t alone in that. Virtually every story I encountered, whether on TV, in the cinema or on the pages of my beloved books, seemed to imply that there could only be one “real” love, and that was the romantic, sexual, erotic kind. There was no getting away from it. From music and poetry to advertising and journalism, almost every aspect of the world I lived in was firmly locked into the idea that the only romantic love could transform human existence into something higher and more beautiful.
Harsh reality
For a good twelve years, I dwelt on the idea of love constantly. I dreamed about it, read about it and wrote about it – but I never seemed to experience it. I had crushes and dated, and even told myself that I was in love, but that transcendent, life-changing passion that the stories promised simply didn’t materialise. My disillusionment was gradual, but inevitable.
A couple of years ago, I slowly began to grow tired of my favourite films and novels. I still enjoyed reading or watching the build-up, the process of falling in love, but I never could find an ending that satisfied me. Back then, I was in a relationship, and had been for years. I was convinced that this man was the only one who would ever love me, and so I clung to him doggedly, long after we’d both stopped even enjoying each other’s company. The initial euphoria attraction and resulting early affection between us turned to irritation as we failed to meet each other’s expectations of perfection, and then to resentment. The relationship ended abruptly, and I was left to realise that I had been lying to myself for all that time. I had never been in love: I had merely been chasing the high of feeling wanted and being viewed as a success in the eyes of the world.
A strange new freedom
The strange thing was that this abrupt revelation was freeing rather than disappointing. True, the end of my long obsession with romance had left a hole in my life, but once I stopped believing that this kind of love was the only enjoyable part of human experience, I was able to explore the world without the blinkers that I’d always worn. Having spent much of my teenage and young adult years reading books that even charitably could only be called trash, I now set out to broaden my mind with some “decent literature”. Shortly afterward, while browsing through the philosophy section of a second-hand bookshop, I came across C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, bought, read it and loved it.
The background to this happy purchase is that around the time of my painful breakup, I had begun to discover the Catholic faith as never before. Despite having grown up with it, I had never really known much about Catholic moral teaching or theology. Curiously, this process of discovery had come about because I had gone online to chat with other romance fans, and then encountered online Catholic communities quite by accident. It was the first time I had really interacted with Catholics my own age, and it sparked my curiosity, especially once that relationship ended. I was eager to find something that would give my life genuine meaning as opposed to the manufactured version I’d experienced before. In that context, The Screwtape Letters represented the introduction I’d been looking for to the world of religious and philosophical thought. Reading it opened my eyes to the idea that a book could be absorbing and interesting without a romantic subplot and I began devouring the works of great Catholic authors of all kinds, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Archbishop Fulton Sheen. However, although I found spiritual reading to be fascinating and intellectually stimulating, it didn’t speak to my heart in the same way that romance novels did. At this stage I had decided that I wanted to live as a faithful Catholic no matter what the cost, even if that meant restraining the emotional and imaginative parts of myself.
Conversion as a love story
Of course, limiting myself to a purely cerebral experience of life was just as skewed an approach as trying to live life entirely on the basis of romantic emotions. It stands to reason that God would not have created this form of love unless it could direct us to Him in some way. If I had continued in my absolute rejection of romantic love, I’m sure I would have done myself some other kind of harm: luckily for me, however, God intervened before I could mess things up any further. And, showing that He knows me as only a good father can, He once again spoke to me through a book.
The book in question was Sally Read’s Night’s Bright Darkness, an atheist, feminist poet’s account of her sudden and mysterious conversion to Catholicism. I bought it out of mild curiosity, having seen a few Catholic book bloggers post about it and was hooked from the very first page: Sally has that rare gift of conveying her interior state with such clarity that the reader feels everything with her, from intense spiritual desolation to euphoric encounters with Divine Grace. I read the whole thing in one evening, following her breathlessly through her agonising bleakness of romantic entanglements post-modern London, her desperate struggle to find truth and meaning through poetry, and her bewildering brush with faith as a young mother grappling with writer’s block. However, it wasn’t just the story or Sally’s elegant, emotional writing that captured my imagination: it was the fact that the whole structure of the book mirrored the model of virtually every romance novel I’d ever read. Her attitude towards the Lord moved from a position of total rejection to reluctant interest followed by a sudden, passionate connection. Then, once she formally declared not just her belief in but her love of God, she had to go through a number of trials and setbacks before she could get a unique kind of happily ever after: baptism into the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church.
My reading of this book was followed by a strange coincidence: less than a week later, a friend texted me, inviting me to join her at a Christian Witness seminar in the conference centre at Lismullin. It was relatively short notice – the seminar was due to take place in less than two weeks – and I didn’t feel like making the long journey to Meath. Then I took a closer look and noticed that one of the speakers at this event was Sally Read. It felt like a sign from God, so of course I went. It was a wonderful weekend that brought many graces, but the greatest of all was the sensation that God was telling me in no uncertain terms that I needed to pay attention to what Sally Read had to say. I’ve reflected on her message frequently since then, and read many other conversion stories by other unlikely brothers and sisters in Christ. I’ve found that they all exemplify the same truth at the heart of Night’s Bright Darkness: that true faith must be the soul’s falling in love with the Lord. And what’s more, true love is always going to be a mirror of this relationship between God and the soul. It is romantic love that imitates the pattern of a conversion, not the other way around.
The Love who made us for Himself
Reading Sally’s book precipitated another gradual but profound shift in my world view. I realised that faith cannot be a dry, intellectual exercise. Sometimes we do experience spiritual dryness, but that’s quite a natural part of life, as our feelings are inconsistent and unreliable. We can’t always be transported by ecstasy! However, this does not mean that we should actively suppress our emotions and try to keep them out of our faith. It also dawned on me that my fixation with romantic love was not, as I had originally thought, a product of my fallen, selfish nature that needed to be rejected at all costs. It was in fact, my soul’s desperate searching for for the love of God: to borrow a much quoted line from St. Augustine, “Because God has made us for Himself, our souls are restless until they rest in Him.” Over time, I came to acknowledge that my romantic neediness reflected this restlessness: it was actually a reflection of my bone-deep hunger for the affirmation, validation and consolation that only God’s infinite love can provide.
It is easy to become neurotic about relationships: when we are single, we often feel as though this means that there’s something wrong with us. When we are dating or married, we can become frustrated because our partners do not satisfy our deepest yearnings for fulfilment. There is great consolation in the knowledge that romantic love, as with all other loves, is given to us to reflect some aspect of God. Like all His other creations, it can bring wonderful graces and make us very happy, but it can never replace Him.
It all starts here
The crucial difference between your average romance novel and a conversion story is the “happily ever after”. Once the slow burn of a romance is consummated and the relationship reaches some kind of steady point, such as marriage, or agreeing to commence a relationship, the story ends, as though life also ends once love is found. However, when it comes to conversions, the story often ends with the person’s realisation that their search is just beginning. This has been my experience too: I have never “found” God, never apprehended all there is too Him in one “road to Damascus” moment. However, as I have searched, I have received hints, here and there, tiny darts of revelation small enough to be dismissed as mere coincidence, and yet so piercing that their impact is out of all proportion to their size. This is what St Paul called seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Cor 13:12), seeing a dim reflection of God in the natural world. This reflection is nothing to the Beatific Vision of the saints in heaven, who see God face to face.
Last Christmas, I read yet another book: Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede. It was a bit of a departure for me, being neither a romance novel nor, strictly speaking, a conversion story. To be precise, the main character does experience a conversion, but that is far from being the focus of the novel. What the plot actually revolves around is that character’s life in a Benedictine abbey, beginning with the day she enters it. This book gave me my first glimpse of something beyond the thrill of that initial contact between the soul and the Lover: to continue with the relationship metaphor, it concentrates on what happens after the “I do”. Once you’ve fallen in love with God, how do you deepen that love, make it real, alive and faithful? How do you live it from day to day and hour to hour? How do you make it fruitful? I’m seeking the answers to these questions now, and sometimes, I’m daunted by the enormity of the quest. But I have this knowledge for my hope: God has brought me this far, by an unlikely, unpredictable route. He is more than capable of bringing me farther still. He does not abandon His children.