“Beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God and anyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God” (1 Jn 4:7).

1. I have always been fascinated by the English word ‘love’. It has two consonants, namely ‘l’ and ‘v’ and two vowels, namely, ‘o’ and ‘e’. ‘L’ for me stands for ‘letting’ for love is an act of the will that ‘lets’ or allows oneself to do the act of ‘v’ which to me stands for ‘valuing’. In love there is an active action of letting oneself ‘value’ another and a passive action of letting oneself ‘be valued’ by another. Now, as for the vowels, ‘o’ stands for ‘other’, the subject-object of valuing while ‘e’ stands for the ‘ego’, the self, also the subject and object of valuing.

2. It is quite interesting how in the word love, the ‘o’ or ‘other’ precedes the ‘e’ or ‘ego’. I find this remarkable because in the Weltanschauung or world view of true love the self or ‘ego’ is last and the ‘other’ is first. We find this perfectly portrayed by the Savior on the Cross where he literally makes himself last and us—his disciples and the world—first. This fits in favorably well with the shorter definition of love by St. Thomas Aquinas as “willing the good of another”.

3. The ‘o’ in love which to me stands for ‘other’ also refers to the ‘Great Other’ (God) and the common ‘other’ (fellow human being or even fellow creature). I find this again to be fortunate because it somehow accommodates the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s declaration that “love makes the world go round and takes it to its source (God)”. Inevitably ‘love’ has to explain itself and in a litany of causes, to paraphrase St. Thomas Aquinas, we must arrive at the First Cause, which cannot not be God. In fact, in the Christian perspective we have the capacity to love only because God, its First Cause, loved us first. “Beloved, love consists in this: not that we have loved God but that God loved us first and has sent his Son as a propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10). What follows from this love received is love given by us to the First Giver (“Therefore, let us love God because he first loved us” [1 Jn 4:19]). But it does not end vertically. Love must also move horizontally, to fellow humans, fellow creatures. “Beloved, if God has loved us so, then we also ought to love one another” (1 Jn 4:11).

4. Love then is at the heart of religion, especially of revealed religion. Love is inevitably, unquestionably religious. In a homily I once asked the “religious” to stand up to be recognized. This was during the Year of the Clergy and Consecrated Persons (2018). I was taken aback when I saw some “lay” women members of a church organization also rising from their seats. When they were asked why they stood up, they said matter-of-factly, “Aren’t we religious too?” Indeed, save for the narrow technical understanding of the term, they had a point. Perhaps without knowing it and without meaning to, the lay ‘religious’ women also took the cudgels up for the men who were not as insistent on their ‘religious’ dimension.

5. For Jews to be religious has something to do with obedience to the Ten Commandments as expressed in 613 precepts issued by Moses. Of these 365 are negative prohibitions and 248 positive formulations. In Deuteronomy 6:3-6 Moses reminds everyone that obedience to the Commandments is essentially an expression of the love of God. Fr Mueller, a priest of the Society of the Divine Word, once said: “Moses makes clear that the love of God is the essence of the Law” (Dt 5:32-6:13).

6. Jesus himself in Mk 12:30 quotes the last part of Deut. 6:5 as the essential first commandment. Jews know this as the “Shema, Israel.” which means “Listen, Israel, the Lord YHWH is the Lord alone (one God)!” It is followed by the words: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Dt 6:5). All these simply mean that we must love God totally, with all our being. There is no part of ourselves and of our lives that is not be ruled by it. It was said of Rudolf Nureyev, a famous ballet dancer, that he “thought ballet, spoke ballet, breathed ballet, and even ate ballet”. Ballet was his first and foremost priority to which all else was subordinate. That is how we must love God. Loving God must be our number one value and all other values must come only second. No love must come ahead of loving God. Christian Bautista once sang a song asking, “Would you be my number two?” Why only number two? I surmised that it is because true love for a believer means God is number one always. Even a spouse or BF/GF has to take only the next best place.

7. But Jesus adds another commandment to that of Dt 6:4-5 on loving God above all and with all our being: “This is the second: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself” which he quotes from Lev 19:18. Jesus says this is “like the first” and that together “there is no other commandment greater than these” (Mk 12:31).

8. For Jesus the love of God cannot be separated from the love of neighbor. We cannot say we truly love God because we come to church, give our tithes, join religious organizations and communities while we mistreat our subordinates, maids, cooks, janitors, the poor. On the other hand, our love of neighbor can only be just as genuine if it is rooted in the love of God. Otherwise, as St. John Paul II used to say, we would be no different from “social workers”, activists or political revolutionaries.

A story is told of a priest who was being recruited by a rebel: “Tutal, Father, pare-pareho naman ang ginagawa natin para sa sambayanan (Anyway, we are doing the same things for the people).” To that the priest answered: “Not quite. We priests and lay workers are doing what we are doing for the poor and the people because of our love for God.” End of the recruitment try.
10. What sums this up is, as I earlier pointed out, Jesus on the cross and the Cross itself. Jesus offers himself totally to the Father (vertical pole) but also totally gives his whole life to us and for our salvation (horizontal pole). Jesus the high priest is precisely different from the Jewish high priests of the OT not simply because his priesthood is eternal and he offered his sacrifice “once and for all” for the forgiveness of sins, but especially because what he does is an act of true love: forgetting himself and offering his very self instead to God and to us sinners. A friend of mine once said: “Some people can give without love; but no one can love without giving. The highest form of giving is self-giving.”

So the next time we are confronted with the question of whether or not our love is true, let us ask ourselves if our love has these two loves inseparably intertwined in everything we say and do. St. Therese of Lisieux once said: “Let us love for that is what our hearts are made for.” St. Teresa of Jesus, OCD would agree. She taught: “It is not essential to think much as to love much.” Or take the words of St. Anthony Mary Claret on the Word of God: “If it is spoken by someone who is filled with the fire of charity—the fire of love of God and neighbor—it will work wonders.”