love is key

Augustine said something like: "Love, and do what you please." I recently listened to C.S. Lewis reading The Four Loves and found it fascinating in its gist and where he was going with it, as well as challenging in its scope and detail.

Love as used by us in our vocabulary means many different things and takes on all kinds of different hues. It can have meaning or be descriptive of turning out toward God and others and being life-giving, or it can be turning inward on oneself and be destructive.

God's love as revealed in Christ is key to understanding the kind of love that should inform, transform and conform our lives to Jesus Christ as little christs and as his Body together and for the world. This love we experience is for others. But we are also always dependent on God and must know and experience God's love before we can pass that love on to others. And not only that, it is a love we have that is receptive to other's love in a kind of interdependency of one another as members of Christ.

This love forgives and receives forgiveness and accepts the reality that it is greatly loved in Jesus, the Beloved. The Trinity is a community of self-giving love, each giving of themselves fully and in a self-emptying way to the other and in that there being the dance of God, which in Christ God takes us in to be participants, even as humans, beginning now.

So much to say on love. I will stop here. I need to think of more stories to tell in sharing about it. Maybe you have something like that, or something to add here.