I just added a short quote by Frederica Mathewes-Green to the rotating list of quotes that show up at right, and it reminded me of one of the most basic things about Christians that I think non-Christians get wrong. Or at least, I hope they do.

In “The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Desert Prayer that Tunes the Heart to God,(**)” Frederica said: The love of God is the only love in the universe worthy of the name.

I knew I was going to quote it right away — it’s just the sort of succinct nugget of Pure Truth that I try to grab onto. But as I did, I knew I had a certain kind of heartache. Occasionally, I’ve been exposed to the extremely low opinion that many in the secular society have of Christians, and whereas there are some accusations they sling that may be true, there are some that show a breathtaking ignorance of what Christians are actually about.

I’m thinking specifically of a university lecture series on philosophy that I bought on tape. The subject was ethics — that is to say, how we determine the difference between right and wrong, good and bad if we’re going to leave religion out of the consideration. I thought I could park my own feelings about the silliness of trying anything of the sort, but as the series progressed, I found myself going from a grudging admiration of the mental gymnastics to puzzlement to frustration and eventually to seething anger. It’s a completely weird exercise to try to define good and evil while still clinging to the enchanting humanistic idea of moral relativism. If there IS no greater good, if nothing ranks higher than humans’ opinions, than you have to resort to endless, endless perorations — as this very learned professor did — to try to explain why Hitler may have been a rather bad sort (but then again, maybe not).

It was insane. I thought I could handle it, but as time went on, I could feel the giant-sized hole in the dialogue — God. Religion. Christianity. It has been very disturbing to me in listening to lectures like this to discover over and over again that not only do academicians not believe in God and Jesus Christ (which I already knew), but that they don’t believe in Christians. They seem not to believe that there are — or ever were — churches full of faithful believers who are not motivated by politics, power games or completely primitive superstition.

All the same, I waited and waited for some mention of Christianity in this exhaustive discussion of how we have gauged good and evil throughout our history. And finally — finally! — the professor gave the most glancing mention possible of the Christian view, but then skipped away by saying something like this: But since Christians are people who hold their beliefs in order to avoid the eternal punishment of hell and gain the eternal reward of heaven, we can’t really consider their opinions to be objective.

I think I just yelled out loud without making any words. If I did say something, it might have been “What … the … heck???” (though I can’t guarantee I didn’t use stronger language).

Is this just me being naive? Did other Christians know that this is how we are being stereotyped? I sat there in the car and thought of the Christians I’ve known, even before I was one. With all their faults, I found them to have a goodness that was unique. I thought of my grandma Grace who gave so much of her meager income away to charities that the IRS came to investigate because they thought she was cheating. I thought of teachers in public school who would try to tell us something about the love of Jesus Christ (a very risky thing to do, even in those days). I thought of the born-again Christian who talked to my sister and I as we were walking home from the mall and started me thinking seriously about the questions I had.

Do non-believers really think that Christians do all these things because we don’t want to go to a Bad Place?

Don’t they know that we’re people in love?

Maybe we don’t show it often enough. Or maybe the current cultural climate truly can’t understand any love that isn’t romantic or erotic. Maybe they don’t really want to know that that kind of love, which has been elevated to such a grandiose level in modern films and literature, is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not that Christians don’t feel romantic love as acutely as non-Christians; it’s just that we know what it’s an imitation of. As Frederica said: The love of God is the only love in the universe worthy of the name.

Or, to quote from Elder Porphyrios in “Wounded by Love(***)”:

When you find Christ, you are satisfied, you desire nothing else, you find peace. You become a different person. You live everywhere, wherever Christ is. You live in the stars, in infinity, in heaven with the angels, with the saints, on earth with people, with plants, with animals, with everyone and everything. When there is love for Christ, loneliness disappears. You are peaceable, joyous, full. Neither melancholy, nor illness, nor pressure, nor anxiety, nor depression, nor hell.

Christ is in all your thoughts, in all your actions.

This is what Elder Porphyrios calls divine eros. And the only reason we can love this way is because we are first loved. As one of the C. S. Lewis’ Blessed Spirits says(****):“I am in Love; out of it I will not go.”

But to bring it back to the Church calendar, this is germane to Meatfare Sunday and the Lenten preparation. In the midst of tossing out leftover meatloaf this week and penciling in all the extra services, let’s make sure we don’t forget what it’s all about. To quote again from Elder Porphyrios:

Fast as much as you can, make as many prostrations as you can, attend as many vigils as you like, but be joyful. Have Christ’s joy. It is the joy that lasts forever, that brings eternal happiness. It is the joy of our Lord that gives assured serenity, serene delight and full happiness. All-joyful joy that surpasses every joy. Christ desires and delights in scattering joy, in enriching His faithful with joy. I pray that your joy may be made full.

Amen and amen. Then maybe in another generation, university professors will have to concede, whether they like it or not, that what we did, we did for the love of God.