The Ancient
Greeks were very intelligent people, evidenced by their inventions of the gyro
sandwich and the toga, which I think we would all agree are some of the most
important inventions in history. But perhaps on par with that is their
contribution to the philosophy of love.
We hear
a lot about love in the second reading – St. Paul says essentially, echoing
John Lennon, all you need is love – love is the fulfillment of the Law. All of
the Old Testament precepts – from such exalted commands as “Have no other God
besides Me” to the rather mundane command not to eat bacon – are all summed up
in the idea of love.
But all
love is not created equal. In our common parlance, we say that we love pizza,
and we say that we love our wives, and we say that we love God…but clearly we
do not love them all the same, or in the same way. We sing about love all the
time, but often we don’t know what love is. So what does love got to do with
it?
In
Greek, there are four different words for love – because the ancient Greeks
realized that there were four different types of love. First, we have storge – love of things. I love my car.
I love my mom’s home cooking. Second, there is another type of love called eros, which is romantic love, the love
we share with our spouses – it’s that “chemistry” between two people that we
often speak about. Third, we have philia
– as in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. This is the type of love
between friends, between family members. But finally we have agape – complete and total self-giving
love, the love where we’re ready and willing to sacrifice everything for the
Beloved. This is the type of love that Christ showed us on the Cross.
You may
have noticed that these four types of love – love of things, romantic love,
brotherly love, and total self-giving love – are very different responses. The
first two are based on the emotions. You can’t really control it. Just try to
get a little kid to love Brussel sprouts – it probably won’t work well. We just
either like it or we don’t. Same with romance – we’re either emotionally attracted
to the other person or we’re not.
But the other
two types of love are very different. They aren’t emotions – they are choices.
We CHOOSE to love because it’s the right thing to do. Also, notice that while
the first two types of love are all about pleasing me – I love pizza because it
is pleasing to me to eat it – the latter two types of love are about
benefitting the other person – I love you and I want to choose to benefit you.
One
could really say that genuine love is only the latter two types of love – the love
of family and friends, and the total self-giving love. A good definition of
love, then, could be: love is self-giving to benefit the other. It is a choice
to lay down our desires, our wants, our very selves so that another person can
flourish. Real love requires sacrifice.
And that
is a far cry from what our culture says is love. Our culture believes that love
is nothing more than an emotion, a warm-fuzzy-feeling towards another person.
Love is neither warm nor fuzzy – it’s as hard and cold as nails being driven
through a crucified man’s wrists and feet.
To truly
love another person, we have to be willing to choose their good over our own.
And love is always directly related to truth. When St. Paul says that love sums
up the law, he isn’t saying that the rest of the law is abolished. Love must be
directed to what is truly good for the person. Thus, we don’t toss out the law –
rather, laws like the Ten Commandments and the moral teachings of the Church
teach us HOW to love, what genuine love consists in. Some things by their very
nature are incompatible with love. For example, to commit adultery is always
and in every case incompatible with love.
This is
really a different vantage point from our culture. Have you ever seen those
bumper stickers that spell out the word “Coexist” using symbols from the
different religions? I appreciate part of the thought behind it – we should
indeed love our brothers and sisters from another faith. But there’s also an
implicit falsehood beneath the veneer – that in order to love each other, we
have to deny the truths of our faith, and see our faith as just one opinion
among many. But love and truth aren’t opposites – they go together. The true
teachings of our Catholic faith about humanity, our relationship to God, marriage,
family, social justice – these truths guide us into love. Only if we love according
to truth do we truly love. After all, love isn’t just an emotion of well-being –
it’s a choice to sacrifice ourselves for the wellbeing of others.
Love
proves itself in deeds. I want to close with the beautiful story of St.
Maximilian Kolbe. Some of you might be familiar with him – he was a Polish priest
who was arrested by the Nazis in the early 1940s and was imprisoned in
Auschwitz concentration camp. Whenever one of the men would escape, in
punishment, the SS Guards used to select ten men from the escapee’s cell block to
die in of starvation in an underground cement bunker. Well, one day, a man from
Fr. Kolbe’s cell block escaped, so all of the prisoners were lined up outside,
as the SS Guard went down the line picking out ten men to die in his stead. As
he reached one man and called out his name, the man fell to his knees, crying
out, “Please don’t take me! I have a wife, I have children! I will never see
them again!”
From out
of the ranks stepped Fr. Kolbe. “I will take that man’s place,” he declared.
The guards were shocked – no one had ever volunteered to enter the starvation
bunker. And yet here was this man, this priest – offering his life for another.
The guards accepted the replacement, and Fr. Kolbe, with nine other men were
starved to death in an underground bunker. But when the guards would come down
periodically to check on them, they were surprised to see – not men crying out
in agony or pleading for mercy – but men singing hymns, praying the Rosary, and
radiating peace and joy. Fr. Kolbe was strengthening them all. Finally, he was
the last one to die, having given his life to save another man – who was
eventually freed from the concentration camp when the war was over, reunited
with his family, and was present in St. Peter’s Square in Rome when Maximilian
Kolbe was declared a saint. St. Maximilian Kolbe - here was a man who knew what
love was, and lived it. Go and do likewise.
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