Love Intensely to Live

In today's first reading (1 Peter 4:7-13) Peter announces that the "end of all things is at hand. Therefore be serious and sober-minded so that you will be able to pray. Above all, let your love for one another be intense, because love covers a multitude of sins."

During his homily at mass, Father Mark asked the school kids if they could describe what "intense love" looks like. Here are some of their answers:

• Sacrifice
• Reaching out to one another
• Loving someone no matter what (i.e. unconditionally).
• Putting others before oneself.
• Never giving up on each other.

Fr. Mark recapped by saying, intense love is putting our whole selves into it.

Let me add my two cents. An activity is intense if it is really experienced, really felt. So to love intensely is to experience love. I feel the pain of loving sacrifice, or of unrequited love. I feel the burden being lifted in forgiving. I experience the joy of friendship, joy in the presence of the other.

To love intensely is really to start living, experiencing life as it happens, moment to moment. As Wendell Berry said (in "Life is a Miracle"), "[L]ife . . . is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, . . . is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated." When I love intensely I accept the other as herself, in the context of her life. I see her, not as a type, but as a unique and unrepeatable person, living, striving to be. I experience her, and share in her pains and joys, her suffering and fortunes.  Of course, to love anything is to appreciate that being for what it is.  The more intense our love, the more reality we experience.

In our religious sense we find the source of living love. Berry again: "[T]he Bible says that between all creatures and God there is an absolute intimacy. All flesh lives by the spirit and breath of God (Job 34:14-15). We 'live, and move, and have our being' in God (Acts 17:28). In the Gospels it is a principle of faith that God's love for the world includes every creature individually, not just races or species. God knows of the fall of every sparrow; he has numbered 'the very hairs of your head' (Mt 10:29-30)." Ibid. at pp. 94-95.

And so my two cents: Loving intensely is the key to living.