The Second Stage of Love—Love of God for the Self’s Sake
The love of God for the sake of self represents the first real movement of conversion within the sinner’s heart. The self-obsessed, narcissistic gaze in a fundamental way begins to turn outward from the egoic self and step away from the crumbling bastion of self-reliance, even if the motive prompting such a change in perspective is still predominantly self-serving and self-preoccupied. This change is usually brought about by trials and suffering.
From the perspective of addiction, it is the realization that the repeated, compulsive flights into pleasure-seeking and dissociation from reality are simply no longer sustainable as the consequences of such thinking and behavior have their deleterious effects on one’s health, relationships, and the whole of one’s life. The addict and sinner at this point just wants the insanity and pain to end. They generally do not know how they got into such terrible misery, but they do know they want out and that they cannot get out by themselves!
Saint Bernard masterfully describes it thus: “That we might thoroughly know this [i.e. God is God and we are not], and not attribute anything to ourselves, God, in the depths of His wisdom and love, made us subject to tribulation. Being feeble and needy, we are forced to turn to God, and being saved by Him we render glory to His name…In this way man, by nature animal and carnal, with no love but for himself, is brought through self-love to love God [emphasis added]” (On Loving God).
For many, the love of God for the sake of self occurs with the proverbial “rock bottom moment,” when the delusion of self-sufficiency has been exposed in all its fraudulence. We admit our need for help and rescue. We cry out for salvation. However and whenever it happens, such a moment (or moments) is a precious grace. In recovery, it is what we know as the gift of desperation! The White Book of SA puts it this way: “‘I give up!’ It may have come with a loud cry or in a moment of quiet resignation, but the time came when we knew the jig was up. We had been arrested — stopped in our tracks — by what we had done to ourselves … How long and how cleverly we had defended our right to wrong ourselves and others, and how long we denied there was any wrong at all! But every wrong attitude and act stored up its own punishment against us from within, until finally, the cumulative weight of our wrongs brought us to our knees.”
Love of God for the sake of self is the advent of surrender and thus the beginning of real humility, the root of all virtuous love. Acknowledging our powerlessness and the unmanageability of our lives compels us to accept that we need help from outside of ourselves. It begins to dawn upon us that we might need a Higher Power to restore us to sanity and save us from ourselves. It is what we in recovery embrace, especially in the first three steps of 12-step recovery. And it is a most necessary start on the road to spiritual awakening and growth in virtuous love, an essential act of faith and trust in something, or rather Someone, who transcends our meager and flawed capacity to face suffering and love well on our own.
That said, there is still a good way to go on the spiritual journey because at this point there is generally little awareness that coming to accept “hardship as the pathway to peace” (Serenity Prayer) requires a recentering (metanoia) of our will and life towards loving God and others as the fullest expression of self. In other words, a person at this second stage of love does not yet fully grasp that loving God and others is not the means by which we avoid suffering, but rather is the means by which we come through suffering to Him and are therefore transformed and redeemed within our suffering by Christ and in Christ. By entering the support and fellowship of a recovery community, by following the ascetical practice of the Twelve Steps, and through faithful devotion in personal, liturgical, and sacramental prayer, the love of God for the sake of self can marvelously become the love of God for the sake of God.
The Third Stage of Love—Love of God for God’s Sake
If the second stage of love reveals to us our utter dependence on God, the third stage of love, the love of God for the sake of God, reveals to us our deepest desire for intimacy with God and represents a depth of love that simply loves God for Himself and for no other purpose or end. It is the beloved yearning to be with the Lover, to be loved and to love. The author of the Song of Songs poetically sings, “Hark! I hear the voice of my beloved…My beloved speaks, and he says to me: ‘Arise, my beloved, my fair one, and come!’ Look, here he comes…My beloved belongs to me, and I am his” (Song 2: 8, 10, 16).
We delight in being with God for His sake and His sake alone. The depth of our love is such at this stage that we transcend the mere recognition of our dependence on God and our need for some good, some answer to a prayer, or some outcome benefiting us. Instead, we are motivated simply to “be with” God in communion, in relationship, in love, for this is our joy and the fulfillment of all our desire. We want Him because He is God, and that is enough. We want to give ourselves away to Him and unite our will totally to His will.
As trust and surrender in God’s goodness and necessity, born in the second stage of love, takes root reflexively, as the practice of loving one another in community becomes increasingly intentional and desirable, and as the ascetical practices of recovery become instinctive and habitual, we begin to live what Saint John the Baptist proclaimed about himself, “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30). We begin to die to the self-centered, egoic self. Through this “death” to self comes a life-changing awareness that loving God for Himself and for no other reason is what truly gives us strength and fills us with abiding joy even in the face of every suffering, trial, and desolation.
This is how the saints loved God in their mortal lives. Our self-will becomes subsumed into God’s will. Indeed, at this stage of love, self-will no longer makes sense and in fact becomes painful if not attuned to fulfilling God’s will in every moment. The love of God for the sake of God is truly what we seek when we pray, “God, I offer myself to Thee, to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy love, and Thy way of life. May I do Thy will always” (Third Step Prayer).
In summing up how we come to love God for the sake of God, Saint Bernard beautifully writes: “First, then, man has some love for God for his own sake, not for God’s. It is already something to feel the limits of his own capacity, to know what he cannot do without the help of God, and to keep right with Him who sustains his life and strength. But, let a train of disasters befall and oblige him perpetually to have recourse to God, if he still get the aid he wants, his heart must be of brass or marble not at last to be touched by the goodness of his helper, not to begin at length to love Him for Himself. Let the frequency of trials bring us often to the feet of God … It soon follows that we are brought to love Him rightly, far more for the sweetness and beauty that we find in Him than for our own self-interest [emphasis added]…Whosoever praises God for His essential goodness, and not merely because of the benefits he has bestowed, does really love God for God’s sake, and not selfishly” (On Loving God).
This series will continue with Part 6.
Pete S. is a grateful Catholic in recovery. He lives in Augusta, GA and helped start a CIR General Recovery meeting at St. Teresa of Avila Parish in Grovetown. He actively sponsors several individuals in CIR. He is also a regular content contributor for the CIR Daily Reflections. And as a result of his recovery journey in CIR, he discerned a calling to the Benedictine spiritual way of life and on September 30, 2023, was invested as an Oblate novice of the Order of Saint Benedict affiliated with St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, PA.