[fortheDeclaration]

Remember when you fell in love with your wife? That sweet expectancy ,the desire to be together forever,the desire to touch and hold.That was compulsion ....but a sweet one. Why would anyone WANT to say no to such a moment of Grace?

The key is 'fell in love with your wife?' Did someone make you fall in love or did you choose to? Is love a choice or not?

Even so, come Lord Jesus

[Romulus]

Since God is love (rightly understood), any incitement to authentic love must be understood as an experience of grace. Just as not all men accept Jesus, man always retains the power to reject grace (and, as Flannery O'Connor says, because grace effects change and change hurts, man is capable of rejecting just about any grace). To say that one chooses to love is meaningless to me -- about as meaningless as choosing to get grace on one's own hook. Grace is something that is extended, not earned, and is either received or rejected. It's there that choice operates, IMO.

Of course, for a Christian, the injunction is that we love not just those we find admirable, but "our neighbor." Love therefore proceeds not from mere reason or will, but from community -- and communion. This is a Trinitarian mystery, all the more mysterious for extending even to our enemies -- a deeply scandalous teaching that much have shocked its original hearers even more deeply than it shocks us. Reason can be perverted by will, however, and thus prevent us from receiving love, which is probably why we fall in love most easily with those who excite some sympathy or appetite in our own reason and will.

The notion that man has no power to resist the will of God strikes me as a fatalism resembling nothing so much as the resigned "Insh'allah" of Islam. The conviction that all that happens is the will of God -- hence, that nothing that happens, including our most extreme actions, can be contrary to his will -- reminds me of nothing so much as the extremest form of Muslim fanaticism.