Love

Love is easily one of God's greatest gifts to us--as Diane Warren says in her song "You Were Loved":  "You'll hold this world's most priceless thing / The greatest gift this life can bring / If you can look back and know / You were loved."  But we tend to forget that in order to be loved, we must love.  We must learn to love unconditionally, and the gift of love includes so many other elements that it's impossible to list them all:  tolerance, forgiveness, gratitude, acceptance, giving, taking.

In his book The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm calls love an art, and as with any art, he says that it must be cultivated, cared for, learned.  It doesn't come naturally to us--we must develop our capacity to love.  It's not that squishy feeling inside that makes us so nervous when we meet that "special someone"--that feeling wears off eventually, leaving us wondering "what happened?"

How often do we have to hear wise people tell us that love is more than something that we "fall" into?  Can we read Paul's words about love in Corinthians (see below) and actually live out those ideas, making them a part of how we act and how we treat others?  I hope so.  I have to admit, I'm not all that good at it yet, but I'm working at it.  I hope that someday I have some wise words of my own to add to the subject. . .

Though I speak with the tongues of people and of angels, but have not love,
I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have
the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and though I have faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love,
I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor,
and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade
itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own,
is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices
in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,
endures all things.     Love never fails.

The Apostle Paul
I Corinthians 13, 1-8