(School Mass): Friday, November 12, 2004

This morning, I want to talk about something pretty simple: LOVE.

We know that God is love. He loves us, and He wants us to love Him back… and love each other, too.

That sounds simple enough. But what does “love” really mean?

Think about the people and things you love.

I love Mom and Dad… and my best friends, too.

I love Maggie.

You know what else I love? Chinese food! And really good pizza. And I can’t forget ice cream!

I also love some TV shows and movies and music… and my favorite books… and the color blue!

And I love the first smell of spring in the air after a long winter.

So: do you think that’s how God would like me to love him—like a pizza or a color or my dog or a smell?

No… not really. For God, love means something different.

The way we usually use the word “love,” we’re speaking about a feeling. I love someone or something because they make me feel good or happy inside. But that’s not exactly what God has in mind.

The reason for that is because you can’t really control your feelings. If your Mom tells you that you have to eat your spinach—and you hate the taste and look and smell of spinach… in fact, you hate everything about spinach!—then you’re just not going to feel good or happy about it.

Now, God commands us to love Him and each other. He says we have to love Him and each other. Just like you can’t force yourself to love spinach, God would never force us to do something that we find impossible.

That’s how we can know that the love He’s talking about is not a feeling.

So what is it?

Well, love is actually a decision that we make with our minds plus all the stuff we do to live by the decision we made. It’s like keeping a promise. Sometimes it may feel good, and sometimes it may not.

For example, we prove to God that we love Him by spending time with Him at Mass every Sunday. Lots of times it feels good to get up on a beautiful day, get dressed up nicely, come to church and pray and sing… but some Sundays, you may not feel like it at all. Maybe you’re really tired… maybe you’d rather do something else. But if you love God, you remember that you made the decision to come to Mass every single Sunday without fail plus you actually keep that promise unless you have a very good reason not too—like being sick or not having any way to get here.

You can see that real love, then, sometimes is a sacrifice. That means it takes a special effort. That means that sometimes it’s hard.

Your parents love you like that. Your Mom probably feeds you every single day—including the days that she doesn’t feel like it—because she loves you too much to let you go hungry! Now that’s how God describes love!

In our first reading today, we heard what God asks of us. Let me read one sentence again for you: “For this is love, that we walk according to His commandments.”

So what God says, then, is this: the way you should love Him—and love each other, too—is to keep His commandments. You all know the commandments.

Love, then, means: honoring God, keeping His name and His day holy, honoring and obeying our parents and teachers and church, being respectful and kind towards all people, staying pure, being honest and never lying or cheating or stealing, and not being mean or jealous.

When we break God’s commandments, we’re not loving God. We’re doing just the opposite. And as you know, another word for breaking God’s commandments is “sin.” So the opposite of love is sin—not a very good place to be.

In our Psalm today, we prayed a beautiful response: “Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord!” Let’s make that our special prayer: that God will help us to love His commandments and do our very best to keep them always.

Amen.