A Reflection of 1 Corinthians 13
Love is not primarily a feeling or
emotion, though love can be accompanied by feelings and emotions. It is willing
the good of the other as other. When we love, we escape the black hole of our
own clinging egotism and live for someone else; to love is to leap joyfully out
of the self.
“Love is
patient, love is kind”, St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:4. Many of us are
good or just to someone else so that he or she, in turn, might be good or just
to us. This is not love, but rather indirect egotism.
If someone responds to our kindness with
hostility or even indifference, we quickly withdraw our generosity. But the
person characterized by true love is not interested in reciprocation but simply
in the good of the other, and therefore, is willing to wait out any resistance.
True love has nothing to do with
resentment, for it wants the success of the other. The person who loves is not
conceited, because she feels no need to raise herself above the other. Just the
contrary: she wants the other to be elevated, and hence she takes the lower
place with joy. Once we understand the nature of true love, we know why “it
bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1
Corinthians 13:7). The one who loves is not focused on himself but on the
object or person of his love. He is not preoccupied with his own weariness or
disappointment or frustration. Instead he looks ahead, hoping against hope,
attending to the needs of the one he loves.
“Love never fails”, continues St. Paul
in 1 Corinthians 13:8. In heaven, when we are sharing the divine life, even
faith will end, for we will see and no longer merely believe; hope will end,
for our deepest longing will have been realized. But love will endure, because
heaven IS love. Heaven is the state of being in which everything that is not
love has been burned away. And in the end, “faith, hope, love remain, these
three; but the greatest of these is love”, concludes St. Paul in 1 Corinthians
13:13.
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