What is Love?

What is Love?  More specifically what is the Love that Christ calls us to?  To love everyone (not just those who love us or whom we are attracted to) as He loves us.  How can we do that?

If the love you are thinking of is the kind of love you feel toward someone you are attracted to that isn't the kind of love we are talking about.  That kind of feeling itself isn't always love.  What is Love?  To love someone is to want what is best for them, to want them to go to heaven.  You can be attracted to someone and want to possess them and keep them for yourself.  Or you can be attracted to someone and want what isn't best for them.  Attraction isn't love.

Love is more of a decision than a feeling.  Love isnt that giddy feeling you feel when you are romantically in love with someone.  We have to love even those who repulse us and even those who have sinned against us.  We love them by praying for them and leading them to reform through our love.

Our love should bear fruit.  If it doesn't bear fruit we need to examine what we think is love and root out all pride and judgement.  Only by striving to love as Christ loved can we bear fruit.  We don't have to do great things, as Mother Teresa says we just have to do small things with great love.  Our love should push us to love the poor and to really assist them with not only money but with our our time.  We have to love the unlovely, even if that person is ourselves.

Love comes from the truth.  It is based in the truth and it has to start with ourselves.  We have to truly know ourselves and love ourselves.  Not in a self-centered way.  We have to truely know ourselves and our faults and know that God loves us to truely love ourselves.  We have to love who we are and not some ideal of ourselves.  Once we do that in some small measure we can move out of ourselves and love others.  We don't have to know and love ourselves perfectly before we love others, but we have to start.  When we move out of ourselves we will learn more about ourselves.

I have struggled greatly with loving myself and others.  I could see all my faults and I didn't unstand how I could love someone so flawed?  How could anyone love someone who was so wrong?  Then one day God made it clear to me He loved me.  That was so hard to accept.  I didn't understand what He was doing.  I fell in love with the Beloved slowly.  As I came to love Him I came to accept myself.  Loving God and accepting myself I have been drawn to accept and now love others.  I am working on truly loving myself and all others.  I now know that i love imperfect people so as an imperfect person I am also lovable.  The one thing I know now, God loves ALL of us and wants us to know and love Him.

Carrying the Christ child out into the world

Merry Christmas!  Today with all its hustle and bustle is a hard day to find the quiet needed for meditation.  Lucky for us Christmas lasts 8 days in our Church, we have the Octave of Christmas.  That gives us plenty of time to reflect on the meaning of our Savior coming into the world, what that means for us, and how we are called to respond.

I have a suggestion for a meditation.  Read the nativity story in Luke's Gospel.  Find a quiet comfortable space, set the scene in a way that will help you focus your mind.  I use a dark quiet room with candles and incense.  Read over the story once to familiarize yourself with it and then again slowly contemplating each sentence.  Next pray to the Holy Spirit to guide you as you meditate on the birth of Christ.  Close your eyes, imagine what the stable where was born, what does it smell like?  There are animals and hay.  What does it sound like?  Do you hear the animals?  Mary and Joseph are they talking?  How does the air feel, is it cold, or damp, or warm?  What do you see?  Look around in your mind.  Look at Joseph, how does he look?  Look at Mary, what do you see?  Finally, let your eyes rest on the Christ child.  What do see?  How do you feel?  Ask Mary if you can hold Him.  Take the Love of the world into your arms.  Gaze at Him, warm and helpless in your arms.  Sit there for a while just holding Him quietly.  Let go, and the Holy Spirit guide you.  There are no wrong answers here, let go and let God.

Now imagine that He never leaves your arms.  You are to carry Him out into the world.  To every person you meet, you carry Him to them.  What is it like to carry Him to your friends, family, and coworkers?  How do explain, who it is that you carry?  The world is introduced to our Savior by you.  He cannot speak to them, you have to speak for Him.  Or better yet, if you let Him, He can speak through you.  What does that mean for you and how you live your life.  If you hide the Christ child and refuse to show Him to anyone except those who already carry Him, are you doing His will.  Do you get tired and refuse to carry Him?  By your actions, do you show the Christ to be Love incarnate, or a fraud?  As Christians, we are embassadors of our faith to the world.

With New Year coming take sometime and write a few resolutions based on what the Holy Spirit lead you to see.  if you want to you can share some of what you learned in a comment.  May God bless you and keep you.

Morning Prayer - Further Reflections on Advent

I am very lucky, not only do I live near my church but I have a key so I can get to church early in the morning and pray before the tabernacle.  These mornings are do like Advent.  Sitting there waiting for God, listening for God.  Finally He comes and I am enveloped in Him and in His light

It is a pregnant time, full of so much longing and yearning.  Wanting to see Him, feel Him,and speak to Him.  It is still dark, but I know that dawn is coming.  Others will arrive and we will start the ritual of Morning Prayer.  Morning Prayer something shared, a lot like Christmas.  Now it is quiet and dark and I sit here watching and waiting for the coming of the Savior.  How Blessed is this time!  It reminds me of how much I long for Him.

Today, I will try to carry this feeling with me, to be always looking for Him today in everyone I meet.  Everyone I see has a spark of Him and it is my job to see it, my job to look for it.  I have heard that Buddists spend their whole day looking for the Budda in every person.  They walk down the street saying to themselves Budda?  Budda?  Budda?  We can learn from them.  We know that God is there in each person.  So when I answer the phone today, I shouldn't be annoyed, I am not just talking to someone, I am also talking to Christ.  He is there in each person, if only we look for Him.  And how do we see Him?  We have to look with Love.  I am still working on that.  May God Bless you.

Advent vs Christmas

The priest at our church is a lovely and very holy man who lives out his faith everyday in who he lives.  Every year he covers our church and rectory in Christmas lights starting right after Thanksgiving.  There are some people who love the lights and some who object to them as participating in the commercialization of Christmas and not giving the season of Advent it's proper place.

We as Catholics are supposed to use the season of Advent to prepare our lives and our hearts for the coming of our Lord and Savior.  It is a time of reflection and prayer and also a time to show our love for God by helping others.  In the world, this time between Thanksgiving and Christmas has become an orgy of spending and consuming.  A time to beat the next person to the best deal on some new gadget.

If the world has forgotten the meaning of Christmas, whose fault is that?  Is it the stores?  The media?  Or is it our fault?  What good is it, in the midst of all the busy shopping and preparation to have our little church be dark?  As people pass by they would not be reminded at all that this time of the year is different. Instead when you pass St Paul's you can not miss it.  It shines like the light of Christ.  It is the lamp what can't be hidden under a bushel.  It is a beacon to remind people that there are still Christians in our world and that we are preparing for the coming of the God of Love.

How can we as followers of the Light of the world honor Advent in our lives?  What are we called to do to carry that light into the world?  If the world has left Christ out of Christmas it is our fault,not theirs.  To often we fail to carry Gods love in our hearts to rest of the world.  We don't practice our faith in the most meaningful ways, by loving.  To truly prepare for the coming of Christ we have to prepare our hearts by forgiving those we need to forgive.  By examining our thoughts and beliefs and purging ourselves of our biases and prejudices.  Christ is coming into our world and we don't know how he will look.  Is he the homeless man who asks us for a couple of bucks?  Is he the immigrant who doesn't speak English?  Is he the single mom who just needs some help to feed her kids?  The answer is that he is all these people.  Celebrate Advent and Christmas not just by not doing but by doing.  Show Christ to the world by how you live and how you love,and just by not putting up Christmas lights.

As always I write this blog more as a reminder to myself than anything else. If you find anything useful in it please let me know.  If you find anything you disagree with, please also share that.