What is Love?

Love is patient and love endures. He who truly loves will persevere for true love is not just a passion of the moment — it results from a serious intention to establish and maintain a certain relationship with the beloved. He who loves doesn’t calculate short-term consequences nor does he take his eyes from the path he follows. He who loves doesn’t get lost in dreams of what’s far ahead of his next footstep.

Love is not passionate desire though passionate desire is an immature form of love, energizing the lovers at first but becoming destructive if they don’t mature in their ways of loving. She who loves will grow and mature and heal even as her love calms and deepens. She who loves will perform the acts of love through periods of passion and periods of indifference.

To enter Heaven, we must become like children in our implicit recognition of our immaturity. We must become like children in accepting the processes of growth and maturity and healing which will bring us to a true adulthood.

God’s love creates from nothing. God’s love also shapes what it has brought into being, but a creature’s love can also shape brethren and hills and cattle into forms pleasing to God. This shaping process is often labeled ‘creative’ and it’s the process of bringing particular things or relationships into a different and perhaps better form. But we must always remember the difference between divine creation and creaturely creation. Not only does God have infinite freedom and power to shape things but He can create being where there was nothing. We mortal men have a very limited but important power to shape ourselves and others around us, as well as our environments.

To enter Heaven, we have to become like children in the Presence of God or the presence of His servants, trusting our Lord and His servants to shape us into our proper forms that we be suited to share God’s life.

Love is the relationship that binds. Gravity and electromagnetism and nuclear forces bind things as love binds moral beings. All those binding forces can operate to form or to deform, to unite or to repel. Love is no different in that regard. Intelligence honed to wisdom is necessary for the proper exercise of love, though most of us can rely on the wisdom of our traditions and especially the wisdom found in the Bible.

When we relinquish our pride, we realize our ties of dependencies are forms of love. We love not just when we give freely but also when we accept without grudging our humble condition.

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