Love - do we understand it at all?!

WORD 2day: Thursday, 9th week in Ordinary time

June 3, 2021: Tobit 6:10-11; 7:1, 9-17; 8:4-9a; Mk 12: 28-34

Two unfortunate sharings I heard recently: one about a husband who decided to disown his wife a year after their wedding, because she was diagnosed with a serious illness; the second a religious who said she had not spoken for the past four years with another sister living with her in the same convent. These two and many such experiences raise a fundamental doubt: are we truly Christian? Have we, as we claim in and through baptism, really immersed ourselves into the mystery that God is? God is love and if we are born of God, we should love.

And there arises another perennial problem: what is love? Have we really understood it? How do we understand it? Have we really imbibed the sense that Jesus wants us to perceive, in love?

While the Gospel reiterates this call that each of us has received, in the first reading today we have a typical example in the person of Tobiah. Once he decides that he loves Sarah, nothing deters him from growing in that perfection. He is told how fatal it can be if he loves Sarah, but he does not hesitate. The reason is, he believed that Sarah was brought into his life by God. Just imagine, if only we look at every person in our life - our parents, our brothers and sisters, spouses, neighbours, colleagues and every one with whom we rub shoulders on a daily basis - as someone who has been brought into our lives by God, how blessed our life shall be. 

God entrusts with persons to love, in our daily life. Love is not merely a feeling; it is an act of faith. To look at every person around me and see and believe that God has given me that person, that brother or that sister, to love- that is the secret. That is true Christian love: does the world today, does every Christian today, do I today, really understand it at all?