“Love, and do what you want,” Augustine wrote in the early 400s. But what does it mean to love truly?
We are captivated by love stories, whether they tell of romance or friendship, whether they are truth or fiction. We wonder at the power of friendship and love to move and shape us. We talk about it, dream about it, pray over it, and always, always look for it. When we take time for love, we are really searching for deeper meaning—connection with ourselves and our Source.
Saint Paul wrote that “love is patient and love is kind” (1 Cor 13:4). Today that might mean waiting for your partner before having supper. It might involve calling a friend. It’s driving your children to hockey practice. It’s spending time with family. It’s feeding the hungry, and offering shelter to the homeless. It’s biting your tongue, and filling your heart.
True love hovers mist-like, hard to describe, just out of reach of any final words. But we know it when we feel it. It proclaims itself in the ‘I do’ of newlyweds, in the faces of new parents, in the touch of lovers. Yet true love possesses other forms as well, more difficult to recognize, more often ignored. True love exists in the parent who demands complete homework, and the spouse who challenges their beloved over addiction. True love is unafraid of caring confrontation, of demanding more, of expecting better. It holds dreams close and only lets go with a struggle, with a cry. It grieves the loss of love, the separation of death, the end of a vision.
True love gives itself for others, makes sacrifices, welcomes love in return. It reaches for the love of God, the ultimate love that would sacrifice and empty itself for humanity, holding nothing back, taking on any suffering, because its bearer knows that love is eternal and nothing good can be destroyed. The love on the cross mirrors the love of the resurrection, bound together, one in sacrifice, the other in celebration, unity, and peace.
True love holds tight to hopes of the future, faith in each other, and forgiveness of failings. It warms and builds, explodes within us, takes us higher, transforms us into our best self, the one God calls us to be. Found as much in friends as in lovers, in the presence of true love you know only one thing. You have come home.
Catherine Cavanagh is also a contributor in this quarter’s issue (XXVI/4), “The Art of Loving.” Her article is entitled, “On Friendship in Dark Places.”
Thank you. I love this one by Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and like to think of Jesus in place of Natasha: “From that day when Pierre, after leaving the Rostov’s with Natasha’s look of gratitude still in mind, had gazed at the comet that appeared to be fixed in the sky and felt something new was beginning for him-from that day the besetting problem of the vanity and absurdity of all earthly things had ceased to trouble him. That terrible question of “Why? What for?” which till then had arisen in the midst of every occupation, was now replaced, not by another question or the answer to the former one, but by her image. Whether he read or was told of human abasement or folly, he was not horrified as formerly, and did not ask himself why men struggled when all is so emphemeral and uncertain, but remembered her as he has last seen her, and all his doubts vanished-not that she answered the questions that confronted him, but because his vision of her instantly transported him to another, brighter realm of spiritual activity, where there could be neither right nor wrong, a realm of beauty and love that was worth living for.”