These universal realities are so rich and varied that even an outline of their essential elements must be quite long: understanding what "being called to love" means requires us to explore intimately related, fundamental questions in four areas: "What are we?"; "Who or what calls us to love?"; "How and when are we called to love?" and "What is love?"

What are we?

The most essential and important question we can ask about ourselves is "What is a human being?" Our answer to every other question depends on our answer to it. In each stage of our lives, the most crucial question is "What is a fetus?", "What is an infant?", "What is a child?", "What is an adolescent?", "What is a youth?", "What is an adult?", "What is an old person?". All these questions have been asked and answered by mature adults using themselves as models of perfection and adult achievements as the most essential human characteristics. Quite naturally, humans in all other stages become imperfect approximations of adult maturity. For many, humans in the early first stage and late last stage become doubtfully human or expendable beings.

For the last 2,500 years the most common definitions of man have been definitions of the adult human being. Man has been defined as a "political or social animal," a "conjugal or historical animal," a free or "pleasure-centered" ("Homo ludens") individual, a "worker, maker or ‘Homo faber’" or a "wolf to other men" ("Homo hominem lupus" of Hobbes). One of the earliest, most enduring and most influential definitions is "Man is a rational animal." In all these definitions of the adult human being, human experience in all stages of life has meaning and value almost entirely in relation to whatever adult characteristic is emphasized in the definition.

Because of its origins in ancient Greek and Roman culture, western civilization has most often defined man as a "rational animal" whose greatest natural achievements consist in either speculative or practical reason. Whether it is our speculative understanding, science and wisdom, or our practical reason in technology, commerce, trade and industry, or in our social, political and moral life, reason is "what is most distinctively and profoundly human." Our moral or prudential life is "right reason in acting" ("recta ratio agibilium"), our art "right reason in making" ("recta ratio factibilium"). Quite naturally, our religious faith is related above all to reason: "Faith seeking understanding" ("Fides quaerens intellectum") and "I believe in order to understand" ("credo ut intelligam") became the medieval leitmotifs of western culture’s positive response to divine revelation.

Trying to define man in an abstract or essential way without adequately taking into account the concrete or existential situations within which we live each of the stages of our lives naturally tends to de-emphasize all but one stage and one characteristic through which we are fully human. Has anyone ever described a newborn infant in terms of any of these definitions? Obviously, many years will have to pass before the newborn becomes independent or free or is able to work or fulfill social and political functions. Yet he or she is already undeniably a member of the human species and is already having experiences that will decisively influence the rest of life.

This leads us to: "Is it possible to reach a definition of man which describes human beings in all their stages of life in both an essential and existential way?" This seems to be what is done in the first, most unique and most profound of all definitions of man: "And God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves’". (Gn 1, 26) In these few words, our Heavenly Father began to reveal that we are made by the Trinity, like the Trinity and for the Trinity, and that our ultimate fulfilment consists in the various natural and supernatural ways in which we share in the wisdom, life and love of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Who or what calls us to love? How and when are we called to love?

God calls us to love in two distinct but intimately inter-related ways: through nature and grace. We are all called to receive and pursue the greatest natural goods in their three main varieties: 1) in all forms of natural learning: touching and tasting, seeing and hearing, intuitive understanding and reasoning as well as intellectual and artistic creativity in all their endlessly different personal and social realizations in all stages of life, 2) in all forms of natural life: in receiving and generating life, in nourishing and fostering ourselves and others, in acting, co-operating and leading, in working and recreating, in growing and helping others to grow within the family and other social groups, and 3) in all forms of natural affection, tenderness and love, in friendliness, friendship and association, in our love of nature and of country, our love of ourselves, of others and of God.

God also shares his wisdom, life and love with us through giving us his super- natural gifts that radically transcend and transform natural corollaries. They begin with and culminate on earth with grace, bringing faith, hope and charity as well as the gifts of the Holy Spirit, leading towards inspired understanding, heroic life and leadership, both beginning with and culminating in sacrificial love meeting our greatest needs and constituting our highest perfection in our personal and social lives. Members of Jesus’ Church share in them through receiving, believing and responding to Holy Scripture and Tradition, i.e., the People of God following the Holy Spirit and the Church’s Magisterium in understanding and living divine Love.

The original divine plan - offering angelic and human creatures perfection through living in the perfect harmony of nature and grace - ended with the revolts of Lucifer and of Adam and Eve. The second and even greater divine plan is the eternal Son of God the Father becoming the Incarnate Son of the Father and of Mary or Jesus, who offers sinners union with him in his Church through love growing towards perfect love of God and neighbor as well as perfect docility to his will. God gave one human being a unique role in that plan: Mary alone was preserved free of original as well as all subsequent sins and given fullness of grace in order to become the fitting mother of Jesus and, by the gift of Jesus (Jn 19: 26-27) our spiritual mother as well. She helps us both in our highest objective vocation - priesthood and religious life - in which "You did not choose me, no, I chose you" (Jn 15: 16) to directly serve him with total dedication, and as lay persons living the theological, evangelical and moral virtues prudentially and above all on the level of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Lay persons and religious live the divinely perfect Beatitudes as "either acts of the gifts or acts of the heroic virtues insofar as they are perfected by the gifts." (S. Thomas, Super Evang Mt 5, 2, #410)

We are called by God and our created nature as well as by God’s grace and Church to life-long and life-wide love, truth and life. In the divine plan, our love-life begins not by our loving but by our being divinely and humanly loved from the first moment of our conception. At conception, God directly creates and lovingly infuses an immortal soul into our tiny, receptive body prepared by the first instruments of his love, our parents. Their act of conjugal love is one of the summits of love, an eminently personal union prepared by the sacramental union of husband and wife.

While we have always known that infants and young children urgently need to be loved, it was only through the decisive demonstration of 20^th century maternal deprivation studies that everyone now clearly understands that unborn babies, infants and small children have so great a need to be loved that to the extent they are not personally and warmly loved, they suffer tremendous, long-lasting, even irreversible physical, psychological and social damage, sometimes even death.

To understand this, we must begin from the beginning. The most striking first characteristic of newborn infants is their utter and total helplessness. They have a life and death need for being cared for in immediate and constant, tender and enduring ways long before almost anything can be known about them or expected of them. They may eventually turn out to be talented, average, or retarded, industrious or lazy, healthy or sick, heroes or scoundrels, but they must be loved here and now unconditionally and as persons. That greatest initial need of infants frustrates the essential thrust of our love of qualities and calls for a nurturing wife and husband, mother and father whose marriage and family are based on unconditional love.

In the beginning, God directly founded the family as a community and school of growth in love for life. In his plan of salvation, Jesus Christ made the family one of the seven sacraments of his Church. In his most explicit and solemn statement about salvation, Jesus describes how our being saved directly depends on our helping to save others: "Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take for your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you made me welcome, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me." (Mt. 25, 34-37; cf Mt. 25, 31-46)

Because of our first experiences in the family, each of us can say:

"From the earliest moments of my life, before even my mother knew that I existed, she was already nourishing me with her own blood, warming me with her own body and attending to all my needs. Then, when she first became aware of my existence, she began to care for me as a willing instrument of divine love. She welcomed her little stranger, fed me when I was hungry or thirsty, clothed me in her warmth and visited me when I was sick. Finally, when I had grown so much that her gentle womb became a prison for me, she liberated her little captive by giving birth to me. Hardly was I born when she began again to welcome and nourish me, clothe and take care of me in new ways, endlessly new and tender ways as those first days turned into months and years. She was co-operating with Jesus in her salvation and mine." (Excerpt from my as yet unpublished manuscript, Good News of Great Joy)

The community in which our mothers lived that love was (hopefully) the Christian family, which we enter into and live unconditionally: Christian spouses take each other "For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health until death do us part." That unconditional conjugal love is the best of all preparations for rightly loving our infants and children, who have an uncanny ability to detect latent indifference or hidden ambivalence. Their need for authentic, tender and unconditional love is unique and urgent. Their first experiences are all entirely centered around inter-personal love. Adult eating may be solitary or social, silent or conversational, meaningful or meaningless. Breast-feeding, on the other hand, involves mutual caressing and fondling, pleasurable body contact, tenderness and affection. This fusion of love and eating, of giving and receiving is an immensely important tenderly-loving interpersonal experience. Adult bathing is solitary, quick and efficient. But for infants, being bathed is an easily prolonged experience of caressing and fondling, a smiling and laughter-filled harmony of communion and communication, of being-loved and loving. Adult travel at its best is mechanical and efficient. Infantile travel at its best is being-carried in loving arms. In pre-rational but immensely and enduringly profound ways, infants appreciate and hunger for love. All their early development, relationships and learning, all their earliest explorations of the surrounding world and first movements towards independence are inseparably linked to love.

As an infant, each of us learns to respect and obey, imitate and identify with our parents because of their love for us and our love for them. As an infant, I seek out, cling to, and unite myself with my mother, live in her presence, share her attitudes, moods and feelings, and have no life apart from hers. I "talk" to and listen to her, "ask" her for whatever I need or want, learn to thank her and ask her pardon, and show by my feelings, gestures, actions and words how much she means to me. I am constantly interacting with her, giving her my attention, presence, needs, affection, looks and smiles, giving her what I am, for I have nothing of my own. Whereas both friendship and conjugal love typically involve independently existing persons of similar age, temperament, talent and activity who contribute differently but more or less equally to the relationship, there is a dissimilar complementarity between infant and mother that mysteriously resembles the relationship between saints or mystics and God. Since both infants and mystics are more loved than loving, and are wholly dependent on merciful love, they alone can rightly and perfectively be predominantly receptive or responsive. For them alone is life almost entirely a matter of love rather than skills, of being rather than having, of being possessed rather than possessing, of personal communion rather than talkative communication. They alone legitimately place nearly exclusive emphasis on love of persons over love of ideals and things.

Since we are persons created in the image and likeness of the triune God and of Jesus, the Incarnate God, our love, hope and faith are eminently personal, familial and communal shares in God himself. Our lives become transcendent realizations of being loved by and loving God. If we are above all images of God, then our first as well as best qualities and virtues will be God-gifted and God-centered rather than reason-induced and reason-centered: in infancy and early childhood, we are loved before we love; receive before we give; and trust before being trustworthy. We can be obedient before we can be prudent; pious and religious before we can be just; patient and persevering before we can be courageous; friendly and merciful, humble and capable of little sacrifices before we are capable of really virtuous temperance. The first and best sources of information on this are the carefully gathered, precisely dated, sworn testimonies of first-hand witnesses cited in theologically examined enquiries leading to the beatification and canonization of saints - all of which begin with the family origin and infancy of each of the servants of God being investigated.

Michael Meaney Ph.D. May 2008