Friendship, Fraternal love
See also:
Friendship among men
Friendship, the love that dare not speak it´s name
A Meditation on Givenness St. John Paul II
We were created by God who is love for divine love, to share in the very life of the Trinity.
All of humanity lost the ability to love or receive love. That is the greatest tragedy which deeply affects all. Only Christ can bring us back to love. This is the work of redemption. Only He can fulfill the hunger of our hearts for love. We must recognize it, know the remedy and respond. God responded first. That is why the Word who is Love became flesh. We need to allow Him to enter and heal our hearts so that He can have full authority over us in all things and at all times. As the Lord heals our hearts, His divine love unites the members of the Body to Himself and to each other. 1 Cor 16:13: "Let all that you do be done in love"
Love unites us
St John Chrisostom,
Office of Readings, Sept 13
Do you not hear the Lord saying: Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst? Will he be absent, then, when so many people united in love are gathered together? I have his promise; I am surely not going to rely on my own strength! I have what he has written; that is my staff, my security, my peaceful harbour. Let the world be in upheaval. I hold to his promise and read his message; that is my protecting wall and garrison. What message? Know that I am with you always, until the end of the world!
...Yet where I am, there you are too, and where you are, I am. For we are a single body, and the body cannot be separated from the head nor the head from the body. Distance separates us, but love unites us, and death itself cannot divide us. For though my body die, my soul will live and be mindful of my people.
You are my fellow citizens, my fathers, my brothers, my sons, my limbs, my body. You are my light, sweeter to me than the visible light. For what can the rays of the sun bestow on me that is comparable to your love? The sun's light is useful in my earthly life, but your love is fashioning a crown for me in the life to come.
But, what is love? Love is Jesus and He revealed love to the fullness by dying on the Cross. Only those who deny themselves for the sake of others love. There is no true love without the cross. We are to love as Jesus loved.
1 Jn 1:7
Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 He who does not love does not know God; for God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
At wedding masses we often hear 1 Cor 13:1-13, but it means very little to us because we reduce it to our own understanding. We need to seek the Lord with all our hearts and thus allow Him to transform us.
1 Cor 13:1-13 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 my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Love is the treasure hidden in the field. Once we find it we need to prefer Him above everything. We are to detach ourselves of all for Christ. But then He re-constructs our lives and brings us to new relationships and a new pure and holy way of relating. He calls us to love one another. This love is not just doing good works. It calls for union of hearts but hearts fully under the the authority and order of Christ the Head.
