Reflections on love

It was Christian personalist Dorothy Day who said something like, 'Love is the only thing that makes sense of a senseless world.' Indeed, I think she was right. There is so much confusion and conflict that one struggles to hold on to the truth of what really matters. It isn't money - even though I've coveted it today. It isn't an object or a goal. But it's love that really matters. It's love that makes sense of life and it's love that is the light which dispells the shadows of confusion and falsehood. I think about what a certain Bulgarian mystic once said, 'Love is not an abstraction, it is the ultimate reality.' 

Yet to love is a challenge. Something that everyone probably knows too well. A challenge that becomes ever more difficult due to the confusions wrought by falsehood or unrestrained desire. Yet, I'm not one to talk. Today I was thinking about money and how to get more of it. But for the moment I realise, money is a distraction. There will always be money, but it can't buy love or real happiness. 

I think some of my friends wonder why I believe in Christianity; the answer I guess isn't so simple. I was baptised a Catholic and went through Catholic education and was raised in a strictly Catholic family. But it isn't just a cultural situation. The essence of my belief is that God is love - And that God, eternal and perfect, gives himself to us, his children, completely, totally and eternally, in every way imaginable and unimaginable, and most ultimately and incredibly in Christ- the living love of God with us. That is why when I think of Jesus, I try not to think of a carpenter that lived over 2000 years ago, or a great moral teacher, but rather I think of love and what it means to really love. To sacrifice everything for the one you love. Truly, I see love when I think of Christ. I see in my heart, God sacrificing perpetual immortality for the sake of his mortal children. I see a love so perfect that not even death itself could restrain. 

I don't know if I could express myself any clearer on my beliefs, but I guess I think that it's all about love. And that love therefore is the only thing that make sense of the world and get rid of all this confusion. 

As I said before, to love is a challenge, but a heavenly challenge - one that gives meaning and one that sets the heart free, whilst all else may bind it. 

I think the expression of love must be in the giving.

Anyway, I end this post of ponderings and reflections hoping that it does make a difference to write these things and to express what I believe. I also hope that it helps me to remember what's important and to consider as Oscar Romero said, 'Aspire not to have more, but to be more.'