(What Is) Love, Actually?

Today's readings:  Psalms 90,  149; Isaiah 8:1-15; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-18; Luke 22:31-38

If you didn't already know, or didn't pick it up over this past week, the traditional theme of the second week of Advent is love. We throw the word "love"around a lot, and tend to use it as if its meaning is consistent and apparent to all. We use just one word to describe feelings, actions and attitudes toward dissimilar things. "I love pizza." "I love God." "I love Blazing Saddles." "I love making love." Sophisticated, precise users of language may choose different words to better express nuance, but in the common vernacular, love is love is love.

As we've reflected on different types of love - romantic, divine, merciful, charitable, etc. - what questions has it raised for you? Through your own experiences and studies, how has your working definition of love changed? Do you experience love primarily as a feeling, an attitude or an action? A mix of all three? Or something else entirely? If we are actively engaged in the world, our understanding of love is endlessly evolving. Take marriage as an example. The passionate intensity of a new love can not sustain twenty, forty or sixty years of marriage; as the years pass, the landscape of the relationship changes. Self help books that teach us our relationship is floundering if we fail to hold onto or rekindle that early passion have it all wrong. Stubborn insistence that love must look and feel the same five, ten or thirty years down the road is deadly to a marriage. Movies, TV and books tell us a relationship that loses its youthful intensity is somehow lacking, but the opposite is often true: just as mature people gain depth, gravity and patience so do mature relationships.

Our love for God and people must be allowed to follow a similar path if it is to mature. Sometimes we need to let go of what we think love is before we can reach that next level of depth. That can be scary, or feel like a loss, especially when the letting go is forced on us. At the close of this second week of Advent, can we commit to bravely exploring a deeper understanding of love over the coming year? We might find God in the most surprising places!

Evening readings: Psalms 80, 72