To love God as he ought to be loved, we must be detached from all temporal love.  We must love noting but Him, or if we love anything else, we must love it only for His sake. St. Peter Claver

I shall always be grateful to our Lord for turning earthly friendships into bitterness for me, because with a nature like mine, I could so easily have fallen into a snare and had my wings clipped; and then how should I have been able to “fly away and find rest”? I don’t see how it’s possible for a heart given over to such earthly affection to attain any intimate union with God. St. Therese of Lisieux

You should have an equal love for and an equal forgetfulness of all persons, whether relatives or not, and withdraw your heart from relatives as much as from others, and in some ways even more, for fear that flesh and blood might be quickened by the natural love that is ever alive among kin and must always be mortified for the sake of spiritual perfection. St. John of the Cross

 Here we have three major saints saying that it is important, if not critical, that we remain detached from our earthly loves, even those that are “natural”, to use St. John's language. It seems a rather tall order and one that could result in a rather lonely life…or not? What does this mean?

As is so often the case, “detachment” is a relative term, dependent on context. For example, it would be wrong for a new parent to take an hour’s  break from looking after a one month old child in order to go out for a break while the child is left alone. Another extreme example would be detaching from a marital relationship and engaging in a series of “encounters” in order to not get too attached to a spouse.

I suspect what these Saints are advocating is to keep human relationships in the broader perspective of one’s relationship with God. Does this particular relationship cause me to become lax in terms of my spiritual practice? How free am I in a particular human relationship? Am I being “used” merely to satisfy another’s wants? Does a relationship compromise a sense of my own worth? Am I in a relationship in which I am being abused?

An  important perspective in these matters is that of God’s unconditional and personal love from all eternity. There is no relationship like it in this earthly sphere—all loves are ultimately conditional. Pick any one of your current love relationships (friends, family, community) and take a minute or two to imagine an action by you that could sever that relationship. How about a possible action by one of  them that would have the same effect?

Is it not the case that much of the one to one level conflicts with our beloveds  have much to do with our disappointment that the “other” is not God? We intuitively know that the perfection of love is an unconditionality (as is shown in many marriage vows:  “In sickness and in health…”). Such language sets a very high bar and inevitably leads to failures.   Perhaps that is why in the Lord’s Prayer , we pledge to do only one thing: forgive.)

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