How Deep Is Your Love?

Deacon Tom writes,

“How Deep Is Your Love”

Deacon Tom writes,

“How Deep Is Your Love?”

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

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 gracious words Jesus speaks to us today as he did to the people in his hometown Synagogue, his friends and neighbors, the people who watched him grow from youth to a young man and iterant 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 hearts desire for genuine, selfless love. “Love is patient, love is kind” Paul says. If he were to stop there, we would have plenty to think about. We would have to work very hard 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; one does not get there over night. Rather 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 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:http://www.catholicfaithstore.com