A popular sentiment in our world today is that “love is love”. First of all, you can not define something by using it in the definition. Secondly and more importantly, we need to define what we mean when we use a word like love. I believe very strongly in the Church’s definition given to us by St. Thomas Aquinas; “to seek the best good of the other person and act towards it.” This takes love out of the sphere of eroticism alone or feelings alone, and places it squarely in the realm of a relationship, and relationships have rules. Our Scripture today shows us that human love is a reflection of Divine love, that means it is all encompassing, sacrificial, and follows God’s definition, not man’s. The Catholic answer to our culture’s slogan of “love is love” is “Love in Truth”. The culture we live in believes only in subjective truth, the idea that each of us defines truth and that our personal definition is sacred and without error. Our definition of love sees God as the authority, not each of us. This will, at the very foundational level of relationships, cause great friction between a Catholic perspective and a worldly perspective. One of my favorite quotes from G.K. Chesterton, a very good Catholic author (one of my favorite pieces of fiction ever is the Tales of the Long Bow) is that: “when a Religion changes itself to court a culture, that culture will soon find itself a widow.” Meaning, if we turn away from God’s definition of Love in order to accept our culture’s definition, that compromise will end up killing that religion, by slowly fractioning it into nothingness. We have seen that with other Christian denominations, under the pressure of societal shifts in morality they have changed their beliefs to be aligned with the worlds’ current belief and fractured repeatedly until there is nothing left. By rejecting our world’s definition of love, we are not hating anyone. We pray for all people, we see all people as worthy of love and having absolute dignity. But if we believe God is God than we owe him our allegiance and obedience. He is our Truth, He is our Love, our lives need to reflect that. May the Love, Peace and Grace of God be with you, Fr. Adam
