y
loving one another. How else can we love God than by loving one another?
With this understanding of the context in which we live and work and
serve one another, let us turn our attention to how love's task is
accomplished.

First, however, a word about what that task is not. The objective of
love is not to create or nurture a so-called normal human being. In the
first place, there is no universal concept of the normal, and the
criterion of normality varies from age to age and from culture to
culture. All men have problems and always will have them. The pursuit of
perfection is a perilous project that may cause all kinds of
imperfections and will inevitably produce disillusionment.

Adjustment cannot be the goal of Christian living and the objective of
love. The clam is adjusted about as well as any of God's creatures, but
has very little to offer beyond a passive role in a bowl of soup.
Instead of striving to mold a person completely adjusted to his
surroundings, love seeks to nurture a person who is capable of
maintaining a creative tension between his need and his responsibility,
between the vitality of spirit and the form of being. And, according to
tests, such creative people often are classified as not normal and not
well adjusted.

Nor is the pursuit of happiness the objective of love. Happiness for
human beings is a forlorn hope. Because of conflicts within himself and
between himself and others, man is doomed to be unhappy most of the
time. He is always having to deal with the inevitable conflicts and
accidents of life that give him a sense of vulnerability, both as an
individual and as a member of his tribe, nation, or race. Instead, the
objective of love is to provide the human being with resources, by means
of which he may face his human existence with courage and with a sense
of peace that passes understanding. It now remains for us to spell this
out in human terms.

_Dialogue Between Individual and Environment_

When the human being is born, he leaves the biological exchange of the
womb for the social exchange system of his society, where his gradually
increasing capacities meet the opportunities and limitations of his
culture. The appearance of the person, therefore, results from the
dialogue between himself and his environment, between his growing,
autonomous self and the directing community upon which he is dependent.
This dialogue between the individual and his environment often has, as
we ha