I love to go to weddings. I love to watch the young brides in their beautiful white dresses coming down the aisle, faces alight with love, excitement, and often tears of joy. I love to watch the young grooms waiting for them, young faces newly solemn with responsibility, protectiveness, commitment.
I also love to go to the ordinations of deacons or priests, or the Profession of Vows of sisters: once again, faces are alight with love, excitement, new senses of responsibility and commitment - and, often enough, tears of joy.
On all these wonderful occasions, people have chosen to take a spiritual risk: to commit to building a new relationship with God through a relationship with either one person or a community. They have chosen to commit themselves to building a family, whether it's a biological family or a spiritual family, and they are making the commitment in front of their own families and communities, asking for their prayerful love, support, and encouragement.
On all these wonderful occasions, people of all ages are affirming and renewing, in front of their communities, that they have chosen to follow the God of Love in a concrete way unique to their own souls. Because, they have discovered, "It is Love alone that lasts. (1 Corinthians 13:13.)
Single people do not have special ceremonies or sacraments by which they affirm their commitment to being loving people in their communities or during which they receive God's special blessings on the lives they have chosen. Yet there are many single people whom I know who have made their own commitments to God and received God's numerous blessings. They live lives so committed and single-minded that their enthusiasm and focus equal the dedication of a spouse, priest, deacon, or religious woman. They too have discovered that "It is Love alone that lasts."
For similar reasons, funerals profoundly affect me - always. At the end of peoples' lives, their loved families and communities come together to celebrate how they have lived out love, responsibility, protectiveness, and commitment because long ago they had discovered "It is Love alone that lasts." Once again there is laughter in reminiscences about that genuinely unique, sometimes quirky, soul. Once again men and women and children are shedding tears of love, tears that are proof that the one who is missed knew how to give love and receive love and build a family or a community. When we look at a coffin and recognize that the one who inhabits it lived a commitment to lasting Love, we commit his or her soul to the Most High. The One Who is Love Itself always welcomes true lovers to His lasting embrace.
Sooner or later, we all discover that love is the only thing in our lives that satisfies the deepest desires of our souls. The lack of love is what leaves people - and animals - poor and famished and dying. Whether we are married, widows or widowers, priests, deacons, religious women, or single persons, it is Love alone that we all strive for, day after day, moment by moment, in all the ordinary and extraordinary situations of our lives. As St. John of the Cross says, "There is nothing better or more necessary than love."
Yet, even knowing the vital importance of loving and being loved, people's faces often go blank when anyone mentions the word "sin." We can pray "Create a clean heart in me, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me," and not recognize that a clean heart and a right spirit come from a daily focus, and concentration, on learning how to love rightly, fully, deeply. The easiest way to examine our consciences, and our hearts, is to ask ourselves "How well am I loving God? How well am I loving the people in my life? How well am I loving myself?" How well am I loving since the day I made those very formal, public or private commitments to God about my chosen lifestyle?"
Whenever we withhold love, we sin. Since love is the most necessary thing, since people are famished and die without it, whenever we withhold love, we sin. It can be loving prayer from a distance, for an opponent or an abuser. Or love up close and sacrificial and personal. We are called to love.
Today, in our society, love seems to be the most expendable object, as marriage relationships are as quickly discarded as used paper towels when the going gets rough, as it always will. Relationships in parishes are as quickly discarded when there are personality clashes, or differing philosophies about parish priorities or finances. Married couples, siblings, parishioners, even friends, argue, and the arguments turn into personal insults, and the insults turn into lies about each other, or paranoia. The other person, the one we have an argument with, the politician whose views differ from ours, the person on Welfare, the refugee, can suddenly turn into Satan himself! Is it any wonder that one of the names for Satan is "The Great Separator"? To keep on loving and understanding when the faces around us are filled with rejection or animosity or betrayal is what brings us to our own Way of the Cross, our own crucifixion.
To sin is to willfully choose to not understand or accept another human being. Even if someone is a sinner, we can still understand, still accept. Whenever in our minds or our words or our actions we reduce another person to being "only" an opponent, an adversary, a sinner, or a threat, we are reducing his or her humanity. We are refusing to acknowledge that we are only seeing, or are aware of, one facet of his or her personality or life. When we reduce another person's life to an unpopular religion that he or she has chosen, or to an ethnic group, or race, we are not seeing the whole person, in all his or her human relationships, loves, worries, dreams, anguish - as God sees him or her. Whenever our thoughts, words, or actions reduce someone else to "only" adversary, opponent, sinner, enemy - and nothing else! - that, my brothers and sisters, is sin.
God is Mercy and Love. We may leave God or others behind us "in the dust" but God never leaves us, no matter what we think, say, do, or feel. We are always safe with God. We can always pour out our angers, hurts, passions and sins to God and know God will understand. Because, God is simple Love. God is not like us. God sees each of us whole and entire. God sees the true loves we have for others as well as our angers, hatreds, sins, and betrayals - and always, amazingly, God sees our capacity to love still more deeply. God will always create a new heart for us and renew a right spirit within us - and bring us back to those commitments we made before we realized how overwhelmingly hard, yet precious, it can be to love.
Whenever we take a step simultaneously forward and inward, whenever we open our hearts so that God can cleanse them of all our sins, our "dirty little secrets," whenever we confess those sins to ourselves, a soul friend, a Pastor, our hearts are light again! Love springs up in us with glad joy - and tears of joy, because we've recommitted ourselves to the daily discipline and inner peace of love.
Fr. Richard Rohr says of those times that our hearts are cleansed:
"Love has you. Love is you. Love alone, and your deep need for love, recognizes love everywhere else. Remember that you already are what you are seeking. Any fear that "your lack of fidelity could cancel God's fidelity is absurd" says Paul (Romans 3:3.) Love has finally overcome fear, and your house is being rebuilt on a new and solid foundation. This foundation was always there, but it took a long time to find it."
Perhaps we wander a long time before we wander home to commitment to God and others. Sooner or later, life will teach us that "It is love alone that lasts."