"Inconceivable!"

Sixth Sunday of Easter

There are many great movies, but one of the great movies is “The Princess Bride.”  It’s a clean movie, a love story, with an all-star cast including Mandy Patinkin, André the Giant, Peter Falk, and Billy Crystal.  It’s a love story with action, adventure, pirates, international characters, and a little bit of kissing.  It has a cult following, and many people, especially around my age, can quote you lines from the movie like it’s nobody’s business; lines like, “Fezzik, are there rocks ahead?” “If there are, we all be dead.” “No more rhymes now, I mean it.”  “Anybody want a peanut?”; or “Hello.  My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die.”; or one of Billy Crystal’s lines, “It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead.  There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.  Mostly dead is slightly alive.  With all dead, well, with all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do.” “What’s that?” “Go through his clothes and look for loose change.”; and, saving one of the best for last, and the one that will get this homily going again rather than just a reading of quotes from “The Princess Bride”: “Inconceivable!” “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Today we hear a word that we say a lot, but I wonder if we know what it truly means.  That word is “love.”  We heard it a lot in our second reading: 

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God….In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world…In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us.

And in our Gospel today we hear about Jesus’ love for us, how He desires us to remain in His love.  And we hear the commandment of the New Testament: “‘love one another as I love you.’”  That’s a lot of love!!  We use the word “love” a lot.  I think we need someone to say to us sometimes: you keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.

We hear all sorts of ideas of what love is: love is a feeling; love is an emotion; love is never having to say you’re sorry; love is never wanting to be with someone else; and the list goes on and on.  There are different types of love, of course.  And maybe some of our confusion comes from the fact that in English we use one word, “love,” to express the way we feel about parents, spouses, friends, sports teams, and food.  Other languages, especially ancient ones, had different words to express the different types of love.  It doesn’t take a philosopher to know that we shouldn’t love our mothers, whom we celebrate today, with the same love we have for pizza.  

We often put love into the context of an emotion or feeling.  But love is truly an act of the will.  We can choose to love or not love.  We may not be able to choose our attractions, but we can choose to love.  When we make love simply an emotion or a feeling, we divorce love from truth, with tragic consequences.  Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in veritate, “Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity…it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion.  Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality.  Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way.”  Love becomes whatever we want it to be, and can be expressed however we want it to be.  When we try to redefine love without truth, pain comes.  How many TV shows and movies geared towards teens show a young woman who is suffering emotional torment because a young man told her that he loved her, just for a one-night stand.  Once the fling passed, he was free to go away, leaving a wake of sorrow and the death of the soul.

On this Mother’s Day, we give thanks to God that our mothers didn’t treat love as an emotion or devoid from truth.  I’m not a mother.  But I know there were days when my mother was not thrilled with my sisters’ behavior (I was always the perfect child, remember).  I’m sure there were times when she had no warm, fuzzy feelings.  And yet, the truth remained that she was our mother, and that truth carried her through when the feelings were momentarily gone.  Another example of love is when a single mother has to work two jobs just to make ends meet, and has to miss games and concerts and plays so that there’s food on the table, even though she would rather be with her children seeing them succeed.  A mother’s love is meant to show us something of God’s love, since God is the source of motherhood (and fatherhood).  Jesus Himself spoke about His love for Jerusalem in the image of a mother hen.  That love, the love of God, is connected with truth, and is not based upon the whims of culture or feeling.  Love, connected with truth, is doing what is best for the other, even when it is painful.   

Sometimes we have to make sure that we really understand what love is.  We know that Jesus calls us to love one another, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes.  Our mothers know that all too well, and have tried to teach us that.  Our understanding of love should be based on the Word of God, not on a passing culture, so that we can truly love one another as God loves us.