Regarding Love
Adoration of the Holy Trinity with the Sacred Heart by Corrado Giaquinto, 1754
For many years, I scorned Love. If Love existed, it seemed a very flimsy ideal, a faked and short-lived sentiment. “Love,” scoffed the Pilate of my heart, “What is Love?” Surely there was a more gratifying answer.
The world presented me a shiny tray of assorted delights. For some time, I did indulge. But I was always cut by the hidden slivers of disappointment. The world had not offered me Love, but shards of something dead and broken, cleverly coated in self-satisfaction. “What is Love?” I mused in discontent.
Next, the world proposed its most esteemed theories on Love. Love is an affection, a commitment, an action, a choice, an ideal, a natural force, a state of being!—it insisted, as it led me into its maze of contradicting dead-ends. At best, I was left with the shifting and useless shadows of half-truth. My lost soul cried out once more, “What is Love?”
Love …is love… is love… is love… was the empty echo back. The world had, at last, revealed its hand: it knew no more about Love than I did. Love was not a force produced or procured by the world. It had only been parroting back at me what I already wanted or presumed Love to be. But Love was clearly not something that originated in me. For I had repeatedly failed to create and secure it—even when I could have, should have, wanted to, tried to. I had very little influence over Love; if anything, Love seemed to influence me.
If Love was neither of the world nor me, it must be of a different realm—the plane of God. For did Love not exist in the exact same ways He existed? Was it not, like God, a supernatural force that lacked simple definition? Could not every question on Love be answered by the things of God: His attributes, His ways, God Himself? God and Love were not separate or even parallel forces, but one. Everything truly of Love is of God because God is Love.
Love is the essence of God, and God the essence of Love. All other claims of Love are merely shams, mirages, or empty idols of self-gratification. But that which is of Love fills and remains. What is Love? Love is God Himself: the spirit of supreme and eternal good which lasts, elevates, transforms, and multiplies. Love continually gives life—new life, even its own life—to something beyond itself.
To seek Love is to chase the very heart of God, desiring to crawl inside. We were each made for and by God—that is, for and by Love. But we have wandered from Him, from Love. And so, Love came down to us in the form of Jesus Christ to remind us that He is Love, and to gather us back to Him. It was Love Himself who suffered and died on the cross for us—not because He or we deserved it, but precisely because He and we did not. It was Love Himself who, after His death, chose to imprison Himself in the Eucharist, that He might stay as close to us as possible—not for His benefit, but our own. Love was fully aware we would continue to abandon, abuse, profane and reject Him in this Most Holy and Blessed Sacrament. But there Love remains still, offering Himself freely and fully to us without complaint or expectation. Only God—only Love—is capable of such extraordinary feats.
I, myself, am no expert on this infinite mystery. I am only qualified to talk on Love because I know Jesus—who is God and Love itself—and I live out my baptism. I am close enough to Him to hear the sounds of Love: His whisper, His heartbeat. I embrace Him on the altar of my heart, in frequent prayer, that the flow of Love might remain unbroken. Yes, there are still gaps in my mind, heart, and will where He does not—yet—perfectly dwell. This is how He continues to draw me in. I bring these holes to Him, through the sacraments of communion and confession, and Love fills them in His time, as He deems best.
What is Love? Regarding this question, I have found only one complete and lasting response: God is Love. Every answer of Love—indeed, even the nature of the question itself—exists in Him.
1 John 4:7-10, 15-17, 19
Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God.
He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins.
Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16 So we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 17 In this is love perfected with us, that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so are we in this world.
We love, because he first loved us.
1 Corinthians 8-12
Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
