JUST like in
the financial world where the value of the
different monetary units in the world is determined in
terms of gold,
the quality and value of our spiritual life, our relation
with God and
with others and everything related to it is determined by
love, the
love that comes from God as is fully revealed and shared
with us by
Christ.
that govern our life. As St. Paul said in his first
letter to the
Corinthians, “these three remain: faith, hope and love,
but the
greatest of these is love.” (13,13)
Even more, he
said: “If I speak in the tongues of men and
of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a
clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all
mysteries and all
knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove
mountains, but
have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have,
and if I
deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I
gain nothing.”
(1 Cor 13,1-3)
Of course,
Christ himself told us what the ultimate
commandment is, what the ultimate good is that God wills
for us. And
that is no other than to love one another as he himself
loved us.
(cfr. Jn 13,34)
That is the new
commandment that summarizes and perfects
all the previous commandments God has given us, including
the 10
commandments and the greatest commandment that Christ
told those who
questioned him about it.
The challenge
now is how to develop this kind of love in
all of us, since it is the be-all and end-all of our
life. Do we at
least make an effort to know what this love entails? Do
we read the
gospel and meditate on it regularly, asking always for
the guidance of
the Holy Spirit, so that we can at least be familiar with
this kind of
love and try to put it into practice?
More
importantly, do we know how to convert all our
thoughts, words and deeds, all our desires and concerns,
our successes
and failures, our business and politics and all the other
mundane
affairs and situations we have, into expressions of this
kind of love?
Unless we know how to fuse theory and practice about
love, we would
actually be not loving as we should.
We have to
realize that all the other virtues can only be
true virtues if they are inspired by love and if they
lead us to grow
more in love. Without love, these virtues would at best
be apparent
virtues only. They can have the appearance and feel of
virtues, but
they actually are not.
Genuine love
can only be achieved if we identify ourselves
completely with Christ who went all the way to offer his
life on the
cross for our sins, for our salvation. “Greater love has
no one than
this, that he lays down his life for his friends,” Christ
said. (Jn
15,13)
And insofar as
Christ is concerned, he already has done
everything so that we can identify ourselves completely
with him. He,
in fact, made himself the “bread of life” so we can do
nothing less
than eat him and attain our most intimate union when he
allows to
enter into our own body not to be assimilated by our
body, but rather
the reverse, to assimilate us into his body, so that we
can truly be
one with him.
This happens in
the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist which,
we must admit, is the most important thing we have in
this life. In it
we have Christ himself, we have all the merits of his
redemptive love
made available to us. He is all ours for the taking.
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