"It's All about Agape Love"

In his book, Knowing Christ Today, Dallas Willard describes behaviors that he believes will bring us closer to knowing Christ: humility, inward rightness, obedience, solitude and silence, fellowship. He concludes, "It's all about agape love."

"Love means that we humbly and simply devote ourselves under God to the promotion of the goods of human life that come under our influence. We live to serve. We do this expecting God to intervene with us to produce an outcome that is beyond all human ability, and we it do it knowing that God is the one 'watching our back.' We cast all our 'care' on him, knowing he is the one who takes care of us (Ps.55:22; 1 Pet.5:5-7)." Knowing Christ Today, 155.

As we await Christmas, traveling with the Holy Family to Bethlehem, we try to imagine Mary and Joseph's anxieties and their expectations, and we try to imitate them in building a "holy family" of our own.

If the Holy Family is the example par excellence of agape love, the following tragic counter-example serves to underscore the crucial importance of agape love, which is "of service," self-sacrificing and life-giving.

A Gift

The boy comes to the back door of the parish,
bearing he says, "A gift."
A crib, its mattress, and a baby bearish
quilt. "I hear you people stand for life."
What came between them, what could cleave a rift
and birth such sorrow?
Girlfriend or wife,
she gave her child no chance for a tomorrow
but left a young man sobbing in despair
on the chipped flagstones of my pastor's stair.
--Timothy Murphy

From First Things, Jan. 2012, p.32.

We, sinful and sorrowful, can learn from the Lord of Love what love means.

Listen to Chrissie Hynde sing (with the Pretenders) "I'll Stand By You"

Same, live performance.