By: Ricardo Valle Andrés (seminarist)

This is a question everybody should ask himself/herself. Love is a word with a wonderful meaning, but we have distorted it, nowadays we do not know what it really means and we use it without considering its true meaning. Unfortunately, we have reduced it to the sexual field and we miss the wonderful power of those four letters. Do we really love?

Charity is the third theological virtue, besides being the most important one. It is God’s love living inside our heart; to love means to have God inside our heart and sharing it with everybody. We could define it like this: “Charity is the theological virtue that makes a person love God above all, just because He is God (not because of interest) and love others also because of God”.

There are two types of love:

• Concupiscence love: It is a love with a personal interest; it loves because it perceives the other as useful, agreeable or pleasant. There is a lot of this false love in our world.

• Friendship love: It is the love of God. It is not selfish. It loves mainly for the good of the other.

The first type of love dominates us, we do everything for selfishness, and we do not act for the good of our brother but for our own good. We say we love the person but we are really using the person, we hope he/she gives us pleasure, company, makes us favors, we manipulate him/her, etc., we really turn the word love in a mere feeling.

Love is not a feeling it is an action. When one really loves, one wishes that the other person lives, one wants to give him/her that life, offer him/her the best so that he/she can be happy. His/her happiness will be ours too because we share it. We do not expect anything in return; the greatest award is knowing that the other person is alright, happy, feeling truly loved. It means to forget about oneself. The most important commandment for a Christian person is to LOVE, because love involves all the others. Jesus Himself says in Mark 12, 28-31: “One of the scribes who had listened to them debating and had observed how well Jesus had answered them, now CAME up and put a question to him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?" Jesus replied, "This is the first: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: You must love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

Also Saint Paul defines charity in 1 Corinthians 13, 1-12: “If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. 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 seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing. For we know partially and we prophesy partially, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things. At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known”.

Why is it so hard for us to love? This is a question each of us must answer; analyze what is the concept we have of that word and how willing we are to strive for the happiness of mankind. We do not know how to tell a friend that we love him/her, we do not dare to, and we have distorted love so much that we immediately think that they are going to misinterpret it. We dare even less to say we love a poor person, we might help that person but without telling him/her that we love him/her.

I invite you to think deeply about this word, to change the feeling into action, to love a friend is always for the benefit of this friend and if we succeed in loving others, our world will be better, we will finish with all the evil and we could live more happily.

Do not feel afraid to love, if you feel loved by God and if you really love Him, you will see how easy it is to share this love with our fellow men, let us not forget that all of us are children of God and that He loves us just as much, with all our qualities, faults and sins.

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