Though it sounds very much like a cliché, Eric Carmen was right to say “Love is all that matters” as well as the Beatles who sang, “All you need is love.” This simple truth about love matters to us Christians whose faith aims to follow the life of Jesus and live out his teaching. Love is the word that can sum up the reason for Jesus' existence. That love never ends points to the mystery of the resurrection. Jesus’ greatest commandment is to love God and neighbors as oneself. It seems there are three players in this act of love, who are God, neighbors, and oneself, but all three become one in loving and being loved as the three are in one in our understanding of God in the trinitarian manner of love, beloved, and loving. Our love of God can only be demonstrated in our love of neighbors who show our capacity of love for ourselves.
In the previous paragraph, the word “love” is used twelve times. My way of using the word shows my presumption that we all somehow know what it actually means. But do we? What do we really mean when we say we love someone? To save the great commandment of Jesus from letting it become a meaningless slogan, we need to keep in mind what love means to us and what we ought to do to love. If we are serious about Jesus’ Great Commandment of love, we can’t assume we know what love is. We need to have a better strategy to learn and train ourselves to love. St. Paul’s description of the nature of love in the lesson this morning can be considered as a good strategy. St. Paul unpacks what love does. While this famous passage on love is mostly heard in a wedding service, which is appropriate for a couple who commits their lives together to love each other, it’s meant to govern all our relationships with others. This morning, I would like to suggest reading it differently by replacing “love” with “I.” So, we read as follows: Am I patient? Am I kind? Am I envious or boastful or arrogant or rude? Do I insist on my own way? Am I irritable or resentful? Do I rejoice in wrongdoing or in the truth? Do I embody the virtues of patience, faith, hope, and persistence? Let’s be more skillful in asking these questions. We begin with ourselves to see if we love ourselves. I’ll liberally reorder these questions as some of them are similar to one another. The last two questions from above are not included since I see them more as a motivating factor to deepen our practice of love in a contemplative way. So, here we begin: Am I patient with myself? Am I kind to myself? Or am I rude to myself? Am I envious or boastful or arrogant? Do I insist on my own way? → Am I insecure of myself? Am I irritable with or resentful to myself? → Am I attacking myself? Asking these questions can be our spiritual practice which we can try out daily for self-examination. These questions are not a set of rules but to pause, reflect, and commit ourselves to love for the sake of love. Patience or kindness that doesn’t include oneself is incomplete because it is its hardest form! We then focus these questions onto others: Am I patient with others? Am I kind or rude to others? Am I envious or boastful or arrogant? Do I insist on my own way? → Am I truly humble with others? Am I irritable with or resentful to others? → Is there room for empathy and compassion? These questions help us navigate how we treat others. Our love for others is expressed in our acts of patience, kindness, humility, empathy, and compassion. Do we want to know if we love someone or not? Examine it with those questions. How patient, kind, humble, and empathetic am I with that person? If we have these questions in mind, it’s not too difficult to see where we are on the path to love. We’re left with the last two questions we’ve created from St. Paul’s remarks on the nature of love: Do I rejoice in wrongdoing or in the truth? Do I embody the virtues of patience, faith, hope, and persistence? I think these questions are meant to inspire us to have a stronger desire for love and help us center whenever we become less patient or kind with ourselves and others. To rejoice in the truth (aletheia; ἀληθείᾳ whose literal meaning is “unforgetfulness”) is to find the true joy in the process of awakening. Joy can only be found within our hearts in which we experience our union with God. Where we rejoice is where we begin again and again our journey to love. So, we can always ask ourselves, “Do I rejoice in the truth? Do I find joy in the union with God through contemplation?” This question then leads us to another question to re-examine our hearts to see if we are getting more skillful at loving ourselves and others: do I desire to embody the virtues of patience, faith, hope, and persistence? Who would’ve thought we need spiritual tactics to love better and deeper? Well, it looks like St. Paul knew it coming and Jesus simply showed us in his salvific action on the cross. Now is the time to practice! |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
|