LOVEReading: 1 John 3: 11-24
St. John writes, “This is the message we have heard from the beginning: We should love one another.” When everything else is stripped away, the one word that is central to the heart of the Good news is love. It was love that drove Jesus. And for him love was not so much a feeling as a decision, the hard choice, involving the Lenten road. It was love that drove him up the steep hill of Calvary and it was love that kept him nailed to the cross until love was triumphant. St. Francis was a man in love with the greatest of lovers. It was love, the love of Jesus for him that undergirded and inspired all he did and who he was. But he was no sentimental or romantic fool, although he was regarded as such by some. He also knew that love was more a decision than a feeling. I’m sure he didn’t ‘feel’ like kissing the leper or sharing their food out of the same bowl into which they dipped their bleeding, oozing fingers. I’m sure the thought of begging for crusts in the streets of his home town of Assisi from the rich who were his one-time companions didn’t immediately fill him with delight. But each time he made the decision to love in this way, the feeling followed afterwards. He was filled with joy. He actively sought out the unlovable and shocked them with the totality of his love, his acceptance, his caring. He didn’t wait to be loved. He went out from the place of comfort and security and opened his arms in love to the world, especially the world of the poor. In doing so, he was following closely in the footsteps of his master. G.K. Chesterton writes of him: “He honoured all men; that is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave him his extraordinary personal power was this; that from the Pope to the beggar, from the Sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernard was really interested in him, in his own inner life from the cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken seriously, and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy or the names in some clerical document.” ³
Sometimes we can be so taken up with our own needs, so consumed with the desire that other people should love us that we have no energy left to see things differently or to be aware that there so many others out there who have never known what it is to be loved unconditionally. It is much easier to talk about loving than it is to do it. St. John says, “Dear children, let us stop just saying we love each other; let us really show it by our actions.” Is it possible that we can pray, “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be loved as to love?”
³ G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi