Love Attracts Love

Love - Singers sing about it. Writers write about it. Painters, poets, seekers, and troubadours spend hours upon hours reflecting on it, expressing it, meditating on it, seeking it. The whole world needs it. Our existence, our evolution, and our survival depend on love--love that comes from one another, love that we give one another, and the love that God has for us and the love that He gave to us. 

Love is deeply embedded in us, in our heart, in our mind, and in the very fabric of our human nature. Even studies using the recent advances in science and technology seem to corroborate the evidence that we are hardwired for love, both the receiving and giving of it. Simply put, to love is to be human. We were created out of love. We love because God first loved us. Our deepest and insatiable longing is for love. Saint Augustine said that "You have made us for yourself, oh God, and our heart will not rest until it rests in you." We find rest in God's love for God is love. Saint Therese of Lisieux reiterated this centuries later when she said: "To love Thee as Thou lovest me I must borrow Thy very love - only then can I find rest." 

But what is love? How do we find it and where do we find it? 

Life is one great love story between Creator and creation, between Lover and beloved. And the incomprehensible powerful force that drives the story is God's love. It is all one big mystery, too vast and too complex for the human mind to fathom. So God sent down His only Son so that we may understand love, through his words and through His very life. 

Jesus gave it straight to us as a new command: "Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." We understood what this meant because His words were followed by His actions, dying on the cross for His beloved. And we know no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for his friends (John 15:13). 

Even though we may have distorted it, the meaning of love remains the same today as it was 2,000 years ago. And it continues to draw us in and give us rest.

Love attracts love, as Saint Teresa of Avila put it. Drawn to God's love and drawing from God's love, we give love. Giving love generates more love for God's over-flowing love abounds.

How do we find love? By giving love. We regenerate the love that God has given us and sharing it with others. Receiving love may give us happiness but giving love gives us that profound sense of joy. Inherent in our acts of giving love are rewards of joy and love multiplied. In a world seemingly full of hate, God's love abounds even more. God blesses us with the opportunity to live out the highest expression of ourselves, of who we truly are--sons and daughters of God made in the image and likeness of God who is love and who has called us to love. As in the prayer of Saint Francis, may we respond the same: "...where there is hatred, let me sow love."