Happy Valentine’s Day

Is there a map for love? Love is a many spledid things. Love is full of import and power. Love is the spark of all humanity. From love is born all of the richness and treasure of this world. Love cannot be bought or sold. Love is not a commodity yet it is our most priceless possession. For anyone who has ever loved they are truly blessed. For each of us that been loved, we stand in the warm glow of Creation. I think love is the remnant of God. Love is the core of our soul. Love is the part of humans that makes us in God’s image. Everything comes from love. Beauty. Generosity. Charity.

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What we forget is also that all negativity comes from love to…it comes from the vacuum left when love is absent or love is maimed or when love spoils. Love can be tarnished. Love can be damaged. Simply living has a toll on love. Like any antique, nostalgia permits the dings love endures. Love can also be taunted and ridiculed. The result is malice or anger or hatred. Love twisted can be equally passionate and dangerous. Love can also wither from sheer neglect. I think of certain forms of malnutrition. There was a time when we sent corn to starving children. These children ate, yet despite their full bellies, they died of malnutrition because corn lacks an essential, required element for life. Corn was just not enough.

Is love enough? I believe it is. But on this day, we focus on romantic love. We perpetuate the passionate love. Don’t get me wrong, passion and lust are fine things. Primitive. Basic. Powerful. I do not think they are base or inferior emotions. I think of them as the rudimentary building blocks of God’s splendid creation. All creatures desire, from seahorses to mockingbirds to lions.  Most desire is driven by the need to procreate, to perpetuate the species.  Only humans escape the inborn default of “heat”. Desire and passion is lifted to a more cognitive place, a place of thinking AND feeling. Lust gets mixed in with LOVE and…VIOLA…Romantic love.

But there is a greater love. There is the ultimate fulfillment. Divine love. Humans understand passionate love, the intimate love between a man and a woman. Most of us also understand brotherly love, the love we have for neighbors and strangers….and even our enemies. What we oftem miss is the awesome force of Divine love. To love God and to feel His love. It is profound. Breathtaking. Confounding.

So…..on this day that the modern, capitalistic society has hijacked……amid the cupcakes

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and candy and cards and flowers and lingerie and Valentines…..remember that it is fundamentally about LOVE.

Love is patient. Love is kind. It is not jealous. Love is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seekits own interests, it is not quick tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrong doing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

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