The law of Love…
(a revision of an earlier reflection from September 2024)
My first real experience with love happened when I was a teenager. We met on a blind date, sparks flew, and we were on our way. It wasn’t that I never felt love before, my parents and family assured me of that. It was that I never felt love that way before. It was a feeling that struck me with a passion that I had never known. Soon we became the central focus of each other’s lives to the exclusion of everyone else. Such is the power of human love.
Being “in love” for the first time changed my life. The whole world seemed different, softer, more inviting. Everyone and everything took on a whole new light. Wow, I thought, so this must be what true love is all about. Such little did I know.
After that first experience, the real work began. What had seemed like an effortless, endless source of joy became a difficult journey through the desert searching for a way forward. What once seemed to satisfy every need eventually became a hunger for something more.
Human love on its own can be fulfilled only to a certain extent. Only God’s love can last for eternity. While our love for each other can help us feel good, even great at times, God’s love takes us to a whole new level. Where it liberates you from all that holds you back and sets you free. It also takes a good deal of effort and discipline to make this happen, not because it is a hard love to accept and live by, it’s that it is hard, really hard, to let go of everything else so you can fully enjoy it.
Jesus helps us to know what true love is by his faithfulness to it. It is the central focus of his very being. He teaches us how to bravely hold onto it as we pass through the challenges of our lives. Then helps us to pass through the biggest challenge -death itself. Where his love reigns supreme and all that separates us from God is conquered and where we are truly set free.
May you always uphold this law of love,
Fr. John
