PEDAGOGY OF LOVE
WE EDUCATE TO LOVE
Focus: Living the Pedagogy of Love as the characteristic feature of our identity, paying particular attention to the signs of the times
In this reflection we will try to offer some inputs questioning us about the Pedagogy of love, seeking answers to fundamental questions about human and Christian love: What is the force, the power of human and Christian love? We affirm many times that God loves us, but … How does He love us? Which are the common characteristics of the pedagogy of love for the Family of Murialdo?
1. What we understand as pedagogy?
To say it, briefly, pedagogy is the art or science of teaching and its object of study, besides formation, is studying education as a socio-cultural and specifically human phenomenon.
Its etymology is related to the art or science of teaching. The word comes from Ancient Greek, from the roots “paidós”, which means "child" and “agô” which means “to lead or guide”. Historically, it was called pedagogue a slave with the task and work of guiding the child in his going to school and coming back.
Currently, pedagogy, as a science, is the union of philosophical, psychological, sociological, methodological disciplines studying the educational fact.
2. Christian and human love
To get into the theme of love and thus get perhaps clearer ideas on the "Pedagogy of love," we quote some statements from prominent authors and will learn from them what love is and what we need to love. At the end of the text we you will find the list of books and authors consulted, whose citations we omitted here to facilitate the fluency of the text.
We start from this principle: Sexuality, as a component of love, is the most powerful energy of the human being. Human sexuality - simply defined as anything that makes a man be a man and a woman be a woman - is the aptitude to love, is the potential and possibility to become love for another person; is the dynamic energy that drives us towards the other one and towards God; is the indispensable element to live as a human person, called to build in his/her self the likeness with God, who is Love. It is, therefore, a divine force.
People seek happiness in love and it can remain only when it is given. Love flows only if it is given to those we love and to those who love us, and not only to them, but to all human beings. Shared love with more and more people is the way of happiness. Love does not narrow down our life, rather, gives it breadth and freedom.
From the powerful energy of love lovers and passionate ones, holy and less holy people draw the strength, enthusiasm and joy that only spring from a heart burning with love. Each person has the imperative need to love and be loved.
The entire human person has already been touched and fascinated by love; but there are also people who have been injured because their love was unrequited or suffer the painful experience of indifference by those from whom they expected to receive love.
3. Life principles applied to love
It is important that we have life principles because they involve a general intent and the acceptance of the purpose coming from each principle. For example, we have, among many others, a life principle: “To do good and to do it well”. Everyone who belongs to the Family of Murialdo know this principle, which is general, and accept it as a purpose.
Jesus directed his whole life through very clear life principles and we can see them in his answer to each temptation of the devil: “Do not live for pleasure and possession! Do not live for power! I shall not leave the responsibility for my life, my actions and my mission even if it would require the cross!”.
As for love, it is important that the life principles are clear, and the Encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI Deus caritas est helps us in this task: he develops the theme resuming the dimensions of love in the classic Greek world, defined as “eros – philia - agape”. According to each life principle one or another dimension can be more stressed.
The Encyclical describes eros as an ascending, passionate and possessive love, a fascination with the promise of happiness, close to passion, falling in love, dating andmarriage. The prophets, especially Amos y Ezekiel, use these metaphors to express God’s passion for his people, emphasizing fidelity for both sides. Man answers living in fidelity to the only God and experiences himself as the one who is loved by God.
Agape defines a descending, giving love, able to see the other one, to worry and take care of him. One no longer looks for himself or his own happiness but he wants the good of the other one and is able of renunciation and sacrifice for the other one’s sake.
Antagonism between eros and agape does not belong to the Christian essence, or what is most essential for Christianity would be disconnected from human existence’s fundamental relations and would separate Christianity from the whole of human life.
Together, eros and agape are the essence of love. Eros, when encountering the other one will ask less questions about himself, about his own good and happiness to seek each time more and more the other one’s happiness and will become “being for the other one”. God’s erosfor man (a God who is passionate, loving, strong in his love) is at the same time agape since he gives himself for free and totally. It is love that forgives Israel, which broke the Covenant, rather than judging and repudiating him. It is a love so great and so passionate that it does not exclude sending to the world his own Son –visible expression of the Father’s love.
“Man, the pope says, cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift”, a reality which Murialdo had very much in his mind: “…The new Rector is only eager to devote himself to your good; he has no other ambition than to love you as sons and to be loved by you as a father” ( Mss 30, 1232/3)
4. Consequences of love or lack of love
In the urgent need of loving and being loved some consequences for the physical, mental and spiritual health are evident:
· Love heals those who receive it and those who give it. It helps human maturity. “Mental and emotional health is the capacity to work and love” (Freud).
· The experience of love is important to be able to love and be loved… Love is a positive mark, fundamental and indispensable in the integral formation of the individual.
· No one will become a balanced person unless he went first through the experience of human love in his growth, this love that is basic in order to discover, accept and live God’s love.
· Increasingly psychologists value the capacity for intimacy and love. Healthy people love, holy people love. Jesus’ mandate that we love each other is not a “if you want”, but an imperative.
· People with little skills for loving relationships with others, the universe, life and things… are more likely to be labelled as psychiatrically ill. Experimental evidence of the harmful effects of a life without love is available in the office of every psychiatrist, full of children and adults who are not aware of their own value or lack sense of identity, who are filled with resentments and fear, tortured by anxieties.
· Love is costly, but other alternatives other than love are mortal. One who insists on staying in the conditions of personal security and stability will not be willing to pay the price of love or find its riches. One who does not expose himself to love, builds up within himself a cold person who does not love and does not relate. The lack of love, lack of relationships is the absence of God himself.
5. How to know if I love
As the psychotherapist Fr Livio Panizza, you can measure the ability to love taking into account the ability to:
· Realize that the other person exists, beyond the indifference, narcissism, egocentrism and childishness.
· Accept the other person as he is, but in a dynamic way, seeing in him the possibility of change, evolution, growth. Perceive the good that he is, the positive he can be.
· Welcome the other personwith the attitude of going towards him, being aware of his situation and focusing attention on the need he has, without unduly intruding on his life, without invading his privacy.
· Taking care of the other personcommitting yourself to his destiny, consuming yourself in favour of him, is to die so that others may have life ("there is not greater love than to give one’s own life for the loved one").
· Unconditionally. In the field of love, there is no third possibility: love is unconditional or conditional. Conditional love is not love, is not a gift, is not gift but exchange. While unconditional love, and therefore truly, is and will always be a free gift.
Love at all levels must be unconditional. I can not say I love you till ...,orwhile ...oruntil when ...
Hedonistic culture, so fashionable, is governed by the principle of pleasure, without responsibility, without personal and social commitment. It forms lonely individuals, each looking at himself, without long-lasting and stable projects. It takes into account today, the joy of the moment. Hedonism relies on the dangerous criterion of I like, I do not like ... it's dangerous because it takes the place of the need of loving which implies renunciations and sacrifices for the loved ones. It implies deprivation, discipline, character, commitment. The pope says: “Eros, reduced to pure “sex”, has become a commodity, a mere ‘thing’ to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity”.
And if you want, here is a“sign of the times”: so much scientific and technological progress and so much depersonalization, dehumanization and lack of love! ... So much family destabilisation, so many breakdowns in relationships, so much scarcity of love!
6. To love with christian love
At this point, we should consider how God loves us. It was already recalled before that the pope recognizes the strength of eros and agape love integrated in the way in which God loves us. And He loves us like this:
· Giving Himself in the Creation - everything is shared divine energy - and the greatest proof of His love is to have sent His Son Jesus, in whom we have life in abundance. “God so loved the world that he sent his Son into the world”.
· Under each cross, where Jesus embraces all the weak and wounded of this world we should read: “This is what I mean when I say that I love you!”. It is peculiar of love to share life and only true love can open itself to this love of God, which is a free gift, unconditional, freely given, not earned, not merited or exacted by any right of ours. Murialdo will say: “God loves us, not because we are good, but because He is good”. In front of this gift there can not be another option but to choose love as the principle of life. “We have come to know and rely on the love that God has for us. God is love, and the person who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1Jn 4:16).
· Giving me life, the potentials of being, ways of development, human growth and growth in the faith journey … Since we are the work of His hands, God appreciates us, wants us and loves us personally. He loves me giving me the people with whom I share life, whom I relate to ... and finally He gives me the material, spiritual goods; the goods of the mind and heart, the trials of life and ways to overcome them.
· Making me able of loving:
o God, in the first place. Jesus does not ask us, as Peter, about our weakness, but about our love. He asks only this: Do you love me?
o my brothers, based, among many others, on the appeal of John in his first letter “Let us love each other because love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God ... God is love and who abides in love abides in God and God in him ... We must love each other because he first loved us”.
o the creation, because it came out from the hands and heart of God and those who love the Creator love everything has to do with its creation. By the way it is good to wonder: where this indifference to nature, this lack of care for the Creation and the disregard of natural laws will take us?
7. For a truly murialdine pedagogy of love
In love is the foundation of the Murialdine Pedagogy, of course inspired by Murialdo, and born from his deep experience of feeling loved by his family, by his spiritual sons, by God and therefore so capable of loving and doing good.
We can practice the pedagogy of love only if our heart is educated by love. Only when we know and feel we are loved we can educate, and so, and only then, will we be surely able to love God with all our heart, with all our strength and our neighbour as “I loved them”. We will be able to lower us and wash the feet, to get up and serve, to spend our life, energy and time giving us to the others and, above all, the last ones, that they may have life and have it abundantly. “The poorer and more abandoned he is, more is ours”. Or in the words of the concluding text of the Murialdo Family Second International Pedagogic Seminar, Buenos Aires, 2008: “We shall go to search for our boys and youth, especially the poorest, those who are excluded and live in greater difficulty, listening to them, talking and meeting them with God’s own eyes. We will educate each other. We will establish an educational relationship as personalized as possible on the basis of the principles of pedagogy of love, “education of the heart”…
And so:“We shall build spaces of communion where everyone may have the chance to feel loved, heard, valued, and so have a home, a family based on the model of Nazareth. We shall see that the educators’ work is done in unity of purpose and action, with one heart. A community of love where the young feel safe, serene and happy. A place where one shares responsibility in action, which gives him the possibility to grow up looking at examples of respect, justice and solidarity”.
A quote from the Circular Letter to the Family of Murialdo written by the respective superiors (May 2009) serves as the crowning of the subject that we have been developing.
The letter, besides recognizing that the Pedagogy of love is nothing but a gentle reflection of the pedagogy of God who led his people toward the fullness of time to welcome the Messiah, gives us these lights:
A proposal as high as this to educate the heart with the pedagogy of love, could run the risk of appearing sometimes an unattainable utopia, when we see us inside the daily hardships and failures.
However, it is our path and our commitment.
Murialdo said: "All methods are good: just that there is affection and harmony of action!"
Experience shows that the encounter with the young man wounded, suffering, and aggressive highlights the educator’s fragilities and weaknesses. He too needs to feel accepted, to know that he belongs to someone, to have close companions in the journey. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to be educators ... alone.
That's why this educative passion should be shared in everyday life among the laity, the religious men and women who form that cell of the Murialdo’s Family living and growing where we live and celebrating its being united around the charisma also through the shared passion for the "pedagogy of Love."
It also emphasizes that the Pedagogy of Love“passes through a theologal aspect that in Murialdo was made "dream" and unceasing commitment: “ne perdantur”. To love is to indicate the path of salvation. We must set free and save the youth from realities coming from the culture of death, which is now spreading more than ever, from the violence that injures the person’s dignity, destroys the family and damage the society. We save through evangelization indicating and witnessing the eternal values so that young people may walk on the road leading to meet God. The dream that was first Jesus’ dream and which Murialdo made his own with his whole being, with passion and zeal, may now be our dream, “that no one be lost”.
The Pedagogy of love as welcome, presence, listening and affection is the identity seal of our Murialdine family!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Benedict XVI, Encyclical Deus Caritas est.
- Final document of the FdMII International Pedagogic Seminar: Let us being loved to Evangelize – Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2008
- Circular Letter to the Family of Murialdo – May 2009
- POWELL John, Unconditional Love – Love without Limits, ThomasMore, Allen, Texas, 1999
- PANIZZA Livio, Psicoterapia Religiosa, Editora particular de Escola em Busca do Ser, 4° Edicão, Curitiba,Paraná, Brasil, 1990. idem 1997
- PANIZZA Livio, Volume 2 – CONHECER a realidade humana e divina, idem 1997
- PANIZZA Livio, Volume 3 – VIVER a realidade humana e divina idem, 1987
- PANIZZA Livio, Volume 4 – COMUNICAR a realidade humana e divina, idem3rd Edition, 1988
- BUSCAGLIA, Leo, Loving each other – The Challenge of Human Relationships, Fawcett Books, New York, 1984
- BUSCAGLIA Leo, Love – What life is all about, Fawcett Books, New York, 1972 GRÜN Anselm, El libro de los Valores – Elogio de la vida buena, Editorial Sal Terae, Santander, 2007.
Sr. Cecilia Dall´Alba, Murialdine Sister
Mexico, 2009
