In the scriptures we are commanded to love one another. But what does that mean? What does it mean to really love and to love other persons, some of whom we may not particularly like? Is love simply a feeling, an emotion? Is it a noun or a verb? Is love a commitment or discipline? Is love simply a spontaneous chemical reaction in our bodies and beyond our control? What is this mystery we human beings know as love? Our first reading today says that God is love.

In Greek there are several different words to convey the different types of love. In addition to infatuation, that mindless vortex of attraction which can seem to us to be like love, there is erotic love which seems rooted in our primal desire to procreate. There is brotherly or platonic love which is somewhat similar to true friendship wherein someone might be willing to lay down her or his life for a friend. There is parental love and we celebrate in a special way maternal love which can be as fierce as a lioness or as tender as a rose petal and perhaps willing to sacrifice everything for one’s offspring. And then there is unconditional love, which is the way God loves us.

The commandment to love is not to love erotically, fraternally or maternally but to love unconditionally. Saint Francis de Sales wrote that Calvary is the academy of love. We truly love when we love as Jesus did, when we surrender our will to the will of God in an act of self-donation.