Love Grows

You know, in this life we have many ups and downs.

In particular, with our families. I know many who have had so many burdens brought into their families, whether through separation or death, sickness or abuse, disobedience or malice, etc... Those who suffer in these ways can testify that these instances are often the greatest pains we endure. Losing a job can hurt, but it is not the same pain that we know when we lose one we love.

Something else I have been reflecting on is this: despite this truth (that life has its pains, sorrows, burdens and sufferings), there is another truth, one that comes hand-in-hand with the first. It is the truth that love grows.

To be philosophic, Aquinas said that God is fully in act, that he is always in actualization, that there is no potentiality in him because of his being. To make that down to earth, God's love, the love that we all experience and know, is a love that is not regressive. The nature of love is to act. For love, acting does not always have to be the "proactive" sense that we normally attribute to the term. It can be a residing, a dwelling-with, a being-of and being-in and being-for. It is not, however, a depletion, or reversal, or negation. Love grows. It may grow in a path other than straight up or in a linear fashion. It may grow in a large circle to include more and more family and friends, for example. It may grow to include more and more of the other person in question as one is revealed to the other. Yet, it moves.

Love becomes sick when it is asked to negate, or regress, or remove itself. In this, I do not speak of God-as-love but as man loving man. Sometimes we do have to draw away from one we love, whether that is from illness or from death, or other instances. These are the times of pain and the hardship of recognizing that our love is not yet perfect. When our love is perfected, we will be before God, and our love will be in Him and through Him and for Him. Then we will understand love's nature in its fullness. Until then, we will see it moving from all the potential we see in our earthly life into the actualization of each and every day's commitment.

That is one of the most beautiful aspects of the love of a family. It is love that begins with two who profess to love one another so much that they believe their love will continue to grow until they die. They are so convicted of this reality, that they will vow it before others and promise that each day henceforth, even though those days cannot be seen or known or anticipated at that time, they will still love one another. From then on, each and every day that they wake up, they renew that promise by living in that relationship. They make it more concrete by bringing into reality what they once said they believed would be true! Furthermore, that love reaches even beyond the two of them and their personal timelines that they have chosen to intertwine together until death, because they bring new life into this world through that love! So the actualization of the love that they possess includes the expansion of new people, who in turn come to understand, encounter and live love of their own.

Hence, we see the dynamism, the vitality, the spirit and the eternal nature that is written into love by its character of being of God. We share in it, and we come to know it, and we give it. We learn from it, we hold it close, we celebrate it. We suffer in it and we find wisdom within it that we could not have imagined. Love is a teacher and a guide. As we grow, love grows. We can only stand in awe at how we seem to lasso our figurative love-stallion at a young age and say to another as we stand at an altar, "here, I have captured my love for you, and it is yours," all the while knowing that the love is yet-to-be, yet to be uncovered as the day has yet to be lived, and yet to be known as the baby has yet to be born, etc... This is the nature of love! It is always beyond us and always within us. It is God who is more intimate to man than he is to himself. God who is the Creator who gives us our freedom and our being, and yet holds us in being. It is his love that contains us and sustains us, and yet we have the generous invitation to make that love our own and to give it away freely.

I only know that as I look back on my short life so far, I am convicted that my love has grown immensely, just as I am convinced that it will not cease to grow as long as I live. Thank God.