LOVE - is how we LIVE love....

An acronym may help:

LOVE [Limitless Offerings Veraciously Expended]

The word love may mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. The word love is used often in many circumstances but my wish here is to speak about it comprehensively and primarily as a driving force that is essential for living well.

Recent popular songs speak about love. "All You Need is Love," was made famous by the Beatles as an important resource in living. "What's Love Got To Do With It," sung by Tina Turner was a hit recording that we still hear today and is described as an emotion. However, I don't think that we learned much about what love may mean.

Dictionaries share a variety of explanations with regard to the meaning of a the word love. I have chosen this one to begin with as a focus for this blog: "love, a strong positive emotion of regard and affection." It seems to speak to a popular notion using the word emotion, "any strong feeling," that may be most common.

In a very popular chapter in Christian scripture, 1 Corinthians 13, love is highlighted as one of the three Christian virtues - Faith, Hope, and Love - but love is called the greatest of the three. While emotion is a part in all three of these virtues, emotion is surely not the primary part of the complete meaning in all three. Indeed, passion, "the trait of being intensely emotional," may be basic to all three, and perhaps more so in the word love, there is certainly much more than passion in the virtues of faith, hope, and love.

In Greek there are six words used for love - 1. Eros, or sexual passion, 2. Philia, or deep friendship, 3. Ludus, or playful love, 4. Agape, or love for everyone, 5. Pragma, or longstanding love, 6. Philautia, or love of the self. The word used in 1 Corinthians 13 is Agape, and in Classical and Modern Greek, is translated as "love: the highest form of love, especially brotherly love, charity; the love of God for man and of man for God."

Therefore this acronym - LOVE: [Limitless Offerings Veraciously Expended] - suggests an eternalness in giving and receiving, in a truthful and trustworthy manner, in a continuous and mutual sharing. It is the charity that stems from the relationship between Divinity and Humanity that enables communities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In this acronym it is seen as an action, as way of expressing life, that goes much further than emotion. True love is limitless, freely offered, truthful from the core of one's being, and actively expended without end. It is definitively an outward and visible sign of inward and invisible GRACE [God's Recreative Activity Causing Excellence] in one's life.

Love therefore is clearly the highest of virtues and bespeaks the highest of character we expect in people we can admire. In John's Gospel Jesus said several times, "Love each other as I have loved you. This is what I'm commanding you to do." For Jesus' love was not just "a strong positive emotion," it also included strong passionate action! Agape, "love for everyone," was focused on the disenfranchised, widows, orphans, sick, those in prison; all who were being oppressed by the rulers and the affluent members of society. Jesus gave his life defending and trying to change the unfairness that existed in his day and urged his disciples to do the same if they were to be his followers, especially today.

How sad it is for me to note, that three centuries after the time of Jesus, the church that claimed his name became the official religious authority for Rome and joined with the Imperial armies to rule. This was nothing like the Kingdom of God that Jesus envisioned for the world and not at all like his great commission to those who would follow him. The love of God that Jesus lived and preached was to bring life, liberty and the freedom to pursue happiness for all people, in all times and in all places. The church that continues has already lost its faulty claim to rule and will continue to weaken until it awakens to serve others in the name of Jesus by truly following his talk and walk!

Gerard A. Pisani, Jr.