Love, huh? Its an amazing thing, this "love" impetus and need that boils so deep inside everyone of us and that provokes us so inescapably. We want love, we long for love, we fight over love, we resent the lack of love, we try to render ourselves immune to the pain and the risk of love. Love: it is engraved on the heart; it constitutes our identity, and we don't even know what it is. We are fooled by cheap deceptions that pose as love. We are ready to run to anything that promises "love." But hopefully, through relationships with other people, we experience and grow in the reality of true love. Even still, it remains a mystery.
Ultimately, it is a mystery because it is at the core of our being in the image of God. The human person is made in the image of God! Don't get down on yourself. You are worthy of love. And you are capable of love. The reality of love is a possibility in every circumstance: in the family, at work, in the loneliness that can be offered as suffering, in difficulties patiently borne, in a concentration camp, in the intolerable dullness of an ordinary day wherein God secretly invites us to embrace the mystery of His ineffable plan. Do not let yourself be cheated. God created you in His image. And God is not a void of ultimate loneliness. God is Love. God is communion. In an infinite and transcendent way, yet in a way that wholly penetrates and constitutes our being, God is the eternal embrace that we all long to give and receive in love.
But who am I to talk of such things. Let Pope Benedict XVI put things in perspective. Here is a quotation that is well worth pondering:
In the light of the Pascal Mystery is fully revealed the center of the universe and of history: God himself, eternal and infinite Love. The word that summarizes all revelation is this: "God is love" (I John 4:8, 16); and love is always a mystery, a reality that surpasses reason without contradicting it, and more than that, exalts its possibilities.
Jesus revealed to us the mystery of God: he, the Son, made us know the Father who is in Heaven, and gave us the Holy Spirit, the Love of the Father and of the Son. Christian theology synthesizes the truth of God with this expression: only one substance in three persons. God is not solitude, but perfect communion. For this reason the human person, the image of God, realizes himself or herself in love, which is a sincere gift of self.
