People really are not looking for somebody with all the answers for life's riddles; they are quite prepared to live with mystery when the sustaining power of love is present. Neither do people expect that some new messiah will reveal to them the complete meaning of life. They look rather for something that will give them the strength to bear with life even when its meaning is obscure and its pressures are intense. They don't want fairy-tale happy endings as much as the chance to get into life more deeply and to love each other more truly. They can accept the seeming unfairness of life, with all its pains and disappointments, when they have been touched by love, and when they have learned that sharing love and friendship is what holds life together. The saints and wise men, by whatever other title we call them, have been friends to man and have helped other people to love each other a little more.
I am in a somewhat curious position in writing about the difficulties of loving. Some people within the Church have been critical of me precisely because I have written and spoken about love before. They would be more comfortable if I did not write about it or if I always made careful distinctions between the love of God (good) and the love of one's fellow man (less good) or woman (highly suspect). Well, I do not believe that you can successfully set Divine and human love over against each other, as though they were antagonistic elements. Real love is all of one piece, and the man who does not face and deal with the human love that comes to him in life has little chance of understanding God's love. You do not give up the one to achieve the other. A man confronts his responsibility toward the person he loves, and in carrying this out faithfully he begins to understand something about the God who is love. Love has its own discipline and demands that are unknown to people who flee from it.
I am not writing this to answer my critics as much as to carry out the responsibilities that experiencing real love in life has placed upon me. You need not be married to sense the pressure in real love to share as best you can what you have learned about life from loving and being loved. When you have experienced real love you know that it does not come in any ideal state, that it is marked with pain as well as joy, and that, if you are serious about it, you have to keep growing in it and working at it. You also know that you cannot keep the experience of love for yourself, that you have to give it away as freely as you have received it, in something of the spirit with which Paul Tillich wrote, "We only want to show you something we have seen and to tell you something we have heard."
That is how I feel about this book. It casts a vote for man and his possibilities when he can be opened to the source of all love, God Himself. But that love is worked out, not on the mountaintop of retreat, but in the everyday round where lovers find the real meaning of life. What is said in this book can only be a partial picture of the challenges of friendship and love. 1 know that wherever I can honestly share my own experience I have a chance of reaching others in a human and helpful way. That is what I think I am, as a preacher of the Gospel, asked to do by the Spirit who is the source of all the love any of us ever know.
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