“SPRINGS OF LIVING WATER”
Daily Spiritual Reflections
31st October 2021
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SUNDAY, THIRTY FIRST WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME
Dt 6: 2-6; Ps 18: 2-4,47,51; Heb 7: 23-28; Mk 12: 28-34
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THE PROPERTIES OF LOVE
Love is more than the spice of life; it is what bestows the meaning to life. Love is the queen of the passions; where love leads, the passions follow. Love drags after itself joy and hope, fear and sorrow. Even anger and hatred are side-effects of love; numerous are the crimes committed because of love. The murder of St. John the Baptist was a side-effect of Herodias’ love for Herod.
The great Carmelite mystic, St John of the Cross, tells us that love is outgoing. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The Gospel tell us that the prodigal son went into a far country to seek his treasure. St Augustine comments that the prodigal went out of himself. Another property of love is that love is equalizing. The father of John of the Cross came from a rich family. But he fell in love with a poor, Moorish girl and lost his rich heritage and shared her poverty. Also, Love is assimilating, rendering the lover to be similar to the beloved. The hearts of many who love money, become as hard as coins. The fourth property of love is that love is unitive.
Love is outgoing: In today’s Gospel passage, however, the command is concerned with our love for God. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, and all your strength.” Let us thank the Lord for giving us such a beautiful and sublime commandment, especially after we have reflected on God’s great love for us. Our love for God must be outgoing. We must leave our ego, and lose ourselves in God.
Love is equalizing: God’s love for human beings was outgoing and equalizing in the Incarnation. God’s love was sent his son, born of a woman, in the likeness of sinful flesh. Jesus went with the sinners to be baptized by John. Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but took on the nature of a slave. He gave his body and blood as food and drink. John, in his letters, says: “This is the love I mean: not our love for God, but God’s love for us.”
Love is assimilating: We shall aspire to grow higher in our thoughts and desires in order to reach God. “Like the deer that yearns for running streams…” so our hearts will be yearning for God. Our thoughts will become like the thoughts of God. Love makes the lover similar to the beloved. A lover of God becomes god-like – holy, loving, gracious, self-sacrificing, Christ-like.
Love is unitive: The command to love the Lord God, is therefore an invitation to the union with God. There are several types of union: there is the union of bodies, in marriage; there is the union of minds, in friendship; and there is the union of spirits, when the soul is united with God. Saints Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross speak a great deal on the mystical marriage between God and the soul. St Teresa wondered and marvelled at the willingness of God to invite her to such divine intimacy. At times she experienced herself to be a worm before the Almighty. However, the goodness of God and his mercy surpassed all that she could imagine.
Not all men and women have the vocation to marry. Just so, not all Christians are called to experience mystical spiritual marriage as Saints Teresa and John were called. But both reason and faith demand that God the Supreme Good and source of all good, be loved than all the good things and the good people he has created. Someone may ask: ‘Does my love really reach God? or is it lost somewhere in the clouds?’ The love of baptized persons will certainly reach God. This is because “God’s love has been poured into our hearts, by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Rom: 5:5)
Jesus united all the commandments into the commandment of love of God and of neighbor. Every human has to be primarily a person for God. The first fruit that God expects from humanity is unconditional and uncompromising love for him. The primary purpose of human existence is to love God. The second commandment is like the other wing. Only with two wings can a bird fly. May we thus grow in the commandments of Love and learn to fly with freedom.
Response: I love you, Lord, my strength.
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