Deacon
Tom Writes,
“Happily Ever After Starts Here!”
How easy it is to say, “I love you”. How easy it was for the people of Nazareth to speak
highly of Jesus and to render a favorable opinion about the gracious words he
spoke. It’s quite a different matter altogether to act with love toward the people we say we love or to respond to those precious
words. Jesus speaks to us today as he did to the people in his hometown Synagogue,
his friends and neighbors who watched Jesus grow from youth to a young man and
itinerant preacher and miracle worker.
St. Paul writes to the Corinthians about love.
Couples often chose these words for their wedding ritual because they capture
our heart’s desire for genuine, selfless love. “Love is patient, love is kind” Paul says. If he were to stop there,
we would struggle mightily to put those words into practice. We would have to
work very hard day and night to show those we say we love a patient love, a kind love. But Paul
doesn’t stop with those two qualities. He goes on to say that there is much
more to love than patience and kindness. He probes the very essence of love to
reveal that at its very core, to love means to surrender oneself completely to
the other. Love, Paul says, “is not
pompous or rude; is not inflated and doesn’t seek its own interest; it is not
quick-tempered nor does it brood over injury. Love does not rejoice over
wrongdoing; it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures
all things”.
Love, then, is so much more than simply saying, “I
love you”. It is the journey of a lifetime to a place we nearly always choose
not to go: it is a place of complete surrender. One does not get there simply
by saying “I love you”. Rather it is the work of a lifetime; it is a slow
process of letting go, of dying to self, of subjecting our very self-will to
the will of others. And, should we really give some thought to this, we can’t
love to the depth that Paul describes by ourselves. We need God’s grace to make
any progress at all. For, if we are left to ourselves, we might act like the
people of Jesus’ hometown who hear his “gracious” words and then, moments
later, try to push him over the cliff. They just weren’t prepared to hear how
abundant and liberating God’s love is and that his love goes out to all who
search for him.
There is little doubt that God’s love remains a
mystery. We will never completely understand the depth of divine love in this
life, but we can experience a glimmer of it through the love of others. The
deeper our love becomes, the more selfless our love will be and the closer we
will come to the source of that love who is God and the better we will be at
sharing that love with one another.
Enjoy the day!
Deacon Tom
Image
credit: Tom Casey_Words of Wisdom to Bride and Groom, Corolla, N.C.
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