McGrath Institute Blog

Editorial Note: This excerpt is taken from an essay by the same name originally published at Church Life Journal on December 18, 2018.

We want to say that love is unconditional. It seems right. It is equal parts comforting and challenging. It is comforting because if I am loved, then there is nothing I can do to lose that. It is challenging because in order to love, I have to will to be untroubled by obstacles. We do not want to say love is conditional because we fear submitting love to the twisted logic of relationship terrorism: if you do not meet my demands, I deprive you of what is good for you, or vice versa. We think of conditions as qualifications and we do not want to attach qualifications to love. So we say love is unconditional. But that is wrong. Love is always conditional.

Editorial Note: This excerpt is taken from an essay by the same name originally published at Church Life Journal on December 28, 2016.

At Christmas, [the] love and the gravitational pull of my heart toward little ones seasonally intensifies. And every year, the fact that our Lord came to earth not as an adult but as a helpless, innocent, dependent little one who needed the arms of his mother Mary and his foster-father Joseph repeatedly stuns me.

But the Feast of the Holy Innocents is not warm and fuzzy.

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