God is Love

Praying the rosary today, I was contemplating the fact that God is love. I have often marveled that we know from divine revelation that the Almighty is three persons in one God: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. The blessed Trinity is an eternal exchange of love. A community of love into which we are called to enter.

Today something else occurred to me. Jesus Christ is live-giving love. (By His love and through his love we are saved from death, reborn into new life.) He shows us what it means to give one's self in love: total sacrifice. Christ is the model for this. We must contemplate His sufferings and death in order to learn how to suffer, even die, for others.

Mary is the model for receiving the divine gift of sacrificial life. Her existence is a resounding "Yes" to Jesus. She shows us how to accept the new life that is given to us as well as every pain, suffering and trial that goes with it. She is the model for receiving love. We must contemplate her mothering of the divine child in order to learn how to receive others, their love and their sufferings for us.

Just as we look to Jesus for life, imitating His sacrificial love in a way that can be truly life-giving to others in that it points them to Jesus, we should gaze on Mary for the supreme example of how to be loved. How to accept love from others, humbly, bear it as a woman bears a child in her womb, bring it to term in our hearts and ultimately offer it back to God in thanksgiving.

To crudely summarize, I think love comes in three "gears":

Forward - giving - sacrificial - Christic
Reverse - receiving - humble - Marian
Neutral - abiding

A few pedestrian examples:

Forward - Your spouse has an opportunity to go to a Bible Study. It means you will have to watch the kids instead of going to the gym as you had planned. This small sacrifice helps your spouse do something good and draw closer to God. You have to give something up but if you do it in love, without resisting, you gain peace and joy as you draw closer to Christ.

Reverse - You are throwing a party and you're feeling overwhelmed with all of the preparations. Guests are asking if they can bring anything. You swallow your pride and say yes. They want to help out of love. You let them. Letting go of the image of perfection, you draw closer to the One who is perfect and you enable others to sacrifice in love for you.

Neutral - You go to a party neither spiritually leaning forward, in expectation of helping everyone there, proving you are a good, loving Christian, nor leaning backward, waiting for others to "embrace" you. You abide. Perhaps one moment you will help another and the next another will help you. (By "help" I mean here to offer up an act of love, a sacrifice.) You shift gears as needed.

This is my thinking in a nutshell. The hard part, as always, is moving beyond contemplation and living it out.