“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.” This verse from 1 Corinthians 3:13 expresses the three most enduring qualities we can possess as Catholics: faith, hope, and love. And since love is the most enduring of these, lets talk about love. What a powerful word, love is. It encompasses so much meaning and is imbued with so much feeling and emotion. Just the mere mention of the word can evoke such powerful images in each one of us and not surprisingly they would all be different because even though it is such a small word, it has the greatest of meaning to us all. This has been true for centuries and it was the Ancient Greeks that comprehended the diverse and complex nature of the word, so much so that they created six distinct words to describe love... These were:
Philia….
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Pope Benedict, in his first encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est, reflected that when using the word “love”:we speak of love of country, love of one's profession, love between friends, love between parents and children, love between spouses, love between family members, love of neighbor and love of God. The question, however becomes: are all of these forms of love basically one, so that love, in all its many and varied forms, is simply a single reality, or are we merely using the same word to describe completely different realities? The answer is both yes and no. More simply put, love, all love, begins and ends with God…for according to 1 John 4:16 “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” When we want to understand Love all we have to do is look at God, for love is God. God’s love for us is unconditional. That is, God doesn’t love us because of some virtue we possess. God loves us because HE is Love not because we are lovely or