LOVE

         is patient            and kind    
       is not jealous        does not brag  
     is not arrogant nor   acts unbecomingly
    does not seek its own is not provoked nor 
   does it take into account  a wrong suffered 
   does not rejoice in evil but rejoices in the 
   truth; bears all things, believes all things 
     hopes all things endures all things, it
         never fails. Faith hope and love 
              abide. But the greatest 
                    of these is
                      love.


In I Corinthians 13, St. Paul sings God's love song.  The song is not
about imperfect human love with all its limitations, but rather 'agape'
love, God's ideal love that works within the limits of our ordinary
lives.  The song crystallizes the qualities of love into simple
absolutes that have never - except once 2,000 years ago - taken solid
hold in the collection of demands that we recognize as our world.  And
yet this love song seems somehow meant for our living it.  It assumes
that love is a power, and that it enables us before it obligates us.

First, love is long-suffering.  To suffer is to be a victim, stuck with
unwanted misery - whether it is loneliness, failure, rejection,
oppression, poverty, pain, or death.  Long-suffering is the power to be
a creative victim.  Long-suffering is not passive, rather it is a
tough, active, aggressive style of life.  It is the power of affirming
and creating life in the midst of suffering.

'Agape' is the love modeled by God in His relations with sinners, the
love that drove Jesus to die on the cross in our place to pay the
penalty for our sins.  Agape love is the liberating power that moves us
toward our neighbor with no demand for reward.

Kindness is a power.  The energy to affect persons outside us is a
personal power.  Personal power can be exploitive when it depends on
the weakness of others.  We can enhance our power, destructively, by
discovering, probing, and then exploiting another's weakness.  Our own
power can depend on the strength of others in a collegial way.  We
enhance our power by bracing, challenging, or stimulating another's
strength.  But servant power ... personal power used to increase the
power of a weaker person, to be free to be gentle, tender, and openly
caring - without enticement for human applause.

Jealousy is aimed at someone who threatens us, threatens to take away
someone we love.  God Himself is a model of jealousy.  He feels pain
when He shares His people with idols.  The idol exists, but the god it
pretends to be does not.  God will not compete for worship with a
fantasy, a hoax, an illusion, a nothing.  But He will share the people
He loves with other people.  He gave His Son to win many sons and
daughters who would love each other as well as Him.  Such love knows
that sharing a friend is not losing one but only making the circle a
little larger.  This love is the power to share without being
threatened.  It is the power also to diminish the pain of jealousy
because it keeps us from expecting too much from another finite
person.  It keeps us from giving our souls to idols, even the idol of
the ideal husband or wife or friend.

Boasting is a grab for praise, covering what we suspect is empty
inside.  Arrogance, by contrast, is a grasp for power that we don't
deserve, that we don't have authority to take.  The root cause of
arrogance is pride, but between  the two stands vanity.  We begin with
the vertical direction, pride toward God.  Pride is an arrogant refusal
to let God be God, to grab God's status for oneself, to be one's own
boss.  Vanity is the emptiness within that is a result of pride.  The
desire to fill tat need of the soul can produce anxiety and arrogance.
But love overcomes all of this with humility, the willingness to accept
the real relationship between God and one's self.  It is the strength
to see one's status as a dependent creature - an invaluable,
responsible, creative person, yet still a creature who needs the energy
of God to exist at all.  The humility to accept oneself before God as a
sinner with spiritual emptiness is also the grace to plead for and
accept forgiveness.  The flip side of this self acceptance is that
humility is the gift to acknowledge God as Creator, Savior, and Lord.

Love then enables us to seek the rights of our neighbor as an end, and
our own rights as only a means.  It is also the discernment to know the
difference.  It puts a long fuse on our emotional bombs, giving us the
joy of gratitude, rather than anger or hostility.  Love turns the
direction of our desire towards the needs of other people because our
deepest needs are met (I John 4:12,16)

Love will not harbor the poison of resentment and its justifying tally
sheet.  The details of the past become irrelevant; only new beginnings
matter.  Love rejects evil and will not rejoice in it through gossip or
rumor, not even as a scale to measure our own virtue.  Rather, it
stands on the side of truth which keeps love honest and keeps it from
silly sentimentality or fuzzy headed "feely-touchiness".

Agape love carries burdens and shares sorrows when human love gives up
or burns out.  It is also the opposite of cynicism that is too
calculating, too reserved, and too prudent to love.  It is the deepest
reason for trusting and believing.  Love's hope looks beyond the
present.  It gives us patience and courage.

All gifts but love are relative.  But love never fails. It is the one
reality in time that goes into eternity unchanged.  It won't need to be
transformed into something better because it is the one perfect eternal
reality - the power that moves us toward another without expecting
reward.

		Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian