What is Love? Baby don't hurt me.

What is love? Baby don’t hurt me.

Love is such a ubiquitous word, especially for English speakers. We love pie (or cake), we love our friends, our girlfriends, we love our country and we love getting off work early. We love our God. But even though we use the same word for different things, we don’t think that the love we have for pie is the same kind of love we have for God or girlfriends (though I may love pecan pie more many girlfriends…)

Because we have one word that covers so many things, it’s hard to know what people mean when they use it. When they use love as a philosophy and say things like: “We should just love other people,” the question should be “what kind of love?”

Jesus did said “love thy neighbor,” but he had a very specific idea in mind. He taught that there are two commandments based on love: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind,” and “love thy neighbor like thyself.” The second commandment is like the first, because the first says that love is giving everything to God, our entire selves. If we give that kind of love to our neighbor, it makes sense that we would love our neighbor like ourselves. They have part of us with them.

Love means gifting ourselves to others. It’s not a desire, or an appreciation, or tolerance. To love like Jesus tells us to is to share openly and be vulnerable; it means investing ourselves in others in ways that they may use to hurt us later. That is why there is an ethic to love.

In the parable of the good Samaritan, love implies a duty, a call to action. We are called to relationship, and to ignore a stranger in need is to ignore a brother or ignore yourself. Being called to love means that the people we meet have the capacity to receive that love; it means acknowledging the humanity in one other, the spark of God we share between us.

Love also entails a responsibility. When we sin and fall short of God, we harm ourselves. We are who we should be when we are at our best, and that best is when we follow God. This is why Jesus tells the apostles that when a brother sins against you, show him his fault between the two of you. If that does not work, bring a friend, and if that still doesn’t work then bring him before the elders of the church. If none of these succeed in correcting your brother, then expel him from the community. We have a responsibility to convert the world because the Christian life is the truest and leads to the person God intends for us to be. When our brothers and sisters in Christ fall short, love impels us to correct them. The tough love we are commanded to show other Christians is only tough because salvation is so serious. If they profess to want it, they should not be accepted as they are, but as they should be.

When people use “love” they usually mean “tolerate” or “accept.” They mean that we shouldn’t judge other people, or impose our own beliefs. Many people use “love” as a way to remain impartial or take no sides, but that kind of love means loving other people no more than cake or pie. I accept them as they are, without requiring change.

But a love that means relationship, where people hold parts of our heart, soul, and mind requires more than that. That intimacy requires duty, responsibility. We can hurt each other too easily. This is what marriage is: a promise before God and the Church to hold in trust and commitment the gift of self our spouse is making. This is why sex outside of marriage is so damaging, because we love and give ourselves to each other with abandon, and that gift is so often betrayed.

Love is a holy thing. It should be treated as such, with all the respect, awe, responsibility, cherishment, and grace it deserves. It is hard to be in relationship with all people, but love demands we be open to that. It is hard to demand people change when we say we love them, but if we demand the best from ourselves we cannot do less for others. It is hard to honor the love between us correctly, and we hurt each other too much.

But this is the love that Jesus models for us, the love that loved perfectly but suffered, that accepts our wounds against him and loves us still. Love in the world is raw and tender, but it is the greatest gift we are given.

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Link to Mass Readings: http://www.usccb.org/nab/061911.shtml

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, and we are called to meditate on that mystery. We believe in 1 God in 3 Persons, where there is only One God, but God has a Son; we believe also in the Holy Spirit “which proceeds from the Father and the Son, and with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified.”

It’s heady stuff; what the Trinity means has been a subject of study ever since the Resurrection, and will be so until the end of the world. But at its most basic, it means love. Love does not exist in a vacuum, love does not exist between one person and themselves. But God is Love, and so much so that He must exist as the Trinity.

God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all one Being, and have always existed, none before the other. “I believe in Jesus Christ our Lord, begot and not made, one being with the Father.” We believe that even though Jesus is the Son of God, there was no time when Jesus was not. One of the hardest things to understand is that the Trinity has always existed as the Trinity, always One, always 3 Persons.

What is the Holy Spirit? My favorite description of the Holy Spirit is that the love between God the Father and Jesus the Son is so real and powerful and alive that it exists as the Holy Spirit. Because it is God, this Love is God as well.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” If God is Love, and the Trinity is fundamentally about Love, and the Holy Spirit is a Love so real it is God, how strongly are we loved! Everyone knows the verse John 3:16, but its familiarity blinds us sometimes to scale of love involved. God sacrificed His Son to save the world, the Son whom He loves so much that the Love between them is God.

If love could be approximated in terms of size, God does not love us with buckets of love, or mountains of love. He doesn’t love us with continents, or worlds, or galaxies of love. He loves us with more than universes of love, He loves us with God’s amount of Love, and that amount is incomprehensible.

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity reminds us to think about who God is. We get busy worrying about our lives and the lives around us, and we forget who it is we worship. We worship God, the Trinity of Love. God does not just love the world, but each of us individually, to the point that He knows the hairs on our heads. He loves us with a God’s Love, and today we remember that and what that means.

Sixth Sunday in Easter

Link to Mass Readings: http://www.usccb.org/nab/052911.shtml

“Hear now, all you who fear God, while I declare
What he has done for me.
Blessed by God who refused me not
My prayer or his kindness!”

Do people know we are Christians? There is a question that was popular a few years ago, and cuts to the heart of the matter: “If we were accused of being Christians, would there be enough evidence to convict us?” For the most part, I’m scared there wouldn’t.

Christ came to make disciples, not establish churches. When we gather on Sundays, it is to worship God with each other, and remember who we are. It is not a fulfillment of our duty as Christians, but respite. Church is when we renew ourselves for what’s outside these walls.

The Scriptures today are about being visible witnesses to Christ. In the first reading, Philip proclaims the Christ to the city Samaria, and the crowds were converted because of his words and the signs he was doing. When we look at our lives, would people be converted by our words and actions? Do we talk about Jesus, or is it a secret we keep until Sunday? Are we acting as the hands and feet of Christ, ministering to the poor and vulnerable? How do we know we are Christians?

Why are we Christians? The second reading warns us to always be ready to explain why you hope Christ will come again, why you hope for salvation. Can we explain it? What is it that drives us to believe something so foolish, that we cannot touch or see?

It is not easy to be a follower of Christ. There is a lot expected of us. But because we believe, we ARE followers of Christ. We are duty bound to follow His commandments, and if we do so we will suffer. But it is ok if we suffer, because Christ has given us the Holy Spirit, the Advocate to be with us. We will not suffer alone. And if we follow Christ’s commandments, and love Jesus, we will be loved by Him and the Father in return. We live for love and hope in the mercy of God.

Why are we Christians? Why do we pray? So often we take for granted our faith and the habits we accumulate, but it is not enough to be comfortable. We should have a reason for our faith, and if we don’t, we need to pray about why we call ourselves Christians. And if we call ourselves Christians, we need to pray about how we know we are Christians.

There is a song I remember from when I was a kid:

“They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love, they will know we are Christians by our love.”