This I command you. That you love one another.

Let’s call her Kveta. She felt very distressed at work. The feeling of loneliness stemmed from being the only believer at work. She often had to defend her faith and justify her positions, which differed from the opinions of her colleagues. She slowly lost the courage and strength to face these struggles and thought about changing jobs. She met a priest. After listening to her complaints, he asked, “Mrs. Kveta, where do people usually put a lamp?” She answered, “Where it is dark”. She immediately understood the question. She understood that her workplace was “darkness,” where it was necessary to bring in, to place “light”. 

This idea strengthened her greatly. She stayed at her workplace. She prayed for strength and tried to bear witness to the Light mainly through kindness and goodness. However, she was abused and mocked. After some time, more than ten of her co-workers returned to the faith of Jesus Christ. Let us remember that “dark places” need “light,” especially through acts of love. Love. A word. It has many meanings depending on who uses it and the context in which it is used. It is a word that some people understand very well from experience, while others only have the message others have told them about it. Some have it in abundance and share it freely, others have little and keep it to themselves.

Love is often associated with romance. The Greeks used eros to describe this love. The feelings associated with it have been described in various ways. Someone wrote that love is “hearing bells ringing, feeling butterflies in your stomach, and acting as if you had bees on your bonnet.” Another joked: “Love doesn’t really move the world, it just makes people strangely strange, so it seems that way.” Another defined it as “something that makes you feel funny and act stupid,” while another added: “Love is something other than delirium, but it’s hard to tell which is which.” Many people said that love is blind, and someone added that it is also deaf and dumb. And something like this was said: “Love makes a man think about a woman almost as much as he thinks about himself.” Someone else wrote, “A dog is the only thing in the world that loves you more than himself,” and then added, “If dogs can think, how can we explain their love for humans? But love is much broader than the emotions of romance.”

Love is the glue that holds friendships together. The Greeks used philia for this kind of love. It is sunlight that kills the seeds of jealousy and hatred. It oils the gears of the household, making it run smoothly. It covers up a multitude of sins. It influences all our actions. As someone once said, “You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.” One might agree with the one who said, “Love is the most beautiful of the flowers in God’s garden.” And one might also agree with this: One of the tragedies of the contemporary Western lifestyle is that love is defined by those who have experienced so little of it. We don’t want to be that. We want to be those who understand love and extend it to others.

St. Francis de Sales wrote, “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.” There is no place where God’s love cannot reach.

Perhaps one of the most eloquent passages in the Creed, the profession of faith we pray every Sunday, is: “He descended into hell,” which we translate today as “he descended to the dead.” Even in hell, God’s presence and mercy can be found. And as one survivor of one of Hitler’s death camps said, “I have already been to hell.” It is the Hebrew God of Moses who sees the suffering of the people of Israel. Israel means “to wrestle with God,” and God, seeing these wrestlers in the hell of slavery, calls Moses to lead them to their liberation. For Christians, Christ is the personification of God’s loving descent into the hell of our lives, those moments when there is only a sense of extreme separation. God comes there too.

Evelyn Underhill tells the story of a holy man who, when asked if Christ could be in hell, remarked: I would rather be with Christ in hell than in heaven without Him.”

The Apostle John speaks of a constant flow of love: from the Father’s love, into Christ, through Christ to the Spirit, and from the Spirit to us. This descent is the self-emptying love of Christ for the poor, the forgotten, and the suffering. It is there, in the hell of Auschwitz, in the hell of a racist society, in the suffering of the earthquake, in the hell of famine, in the hell of violence… that love is found.

This process is a constant movement of flow and exchange, in which the power and energy of love are maintained and grow. It is this energy that Albert Einstein’s daughter shared in a letter from her father. In it, she wrote that the true spiritual energy of the universe is not E=MC2, but, in her father’s last letter to humanity, it is: E=LOVE. And it flows, it spills into the universe, a force that builds, renews, and reevaluates what it means to be human. 

Through the intercession of the Queen of May, let us ask for the grace to participate in Christ’s love here on earth and throughout eternity.  
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