Maybe we should rethink love

I read these meditations from the Magnificat and often find words or thoughts that leap out from the pages at me.  The idea that I am not love but rather God is Love - I am only free to choose to be either IN love or get caught up in some pseudo-love.

Is not love at the same time a gift that has been bestowed on us? This is perhaps the token of its transcendence, in origin and end.  It seems that love does not depend on us, either in its birth or its fulfillment; and that it breaks down all the barriers that might have seemed to limit our actions. So long as we are lacking in love we are immured (entomb) within the solitude of individual existence, and love alone can set us free.

Love plunges us into a world without limits where we are at the same time within and yet outside ourselves. And by a strange paradox we only seem to reach the heart of our being through a movement which takes us beyond ourselves. In other words all love comes from God and returns to him.

There is indeed no love but the love of God: that is the indissoluble union of his unfailing love for us, and the love we have for him in which we almost always fall short. Such love alone is able to justify our existence and the entire work of creation, and for one who has experience of it problems cease to exist. But no one experiences it at all times, or with equal ardor. It is inevitable that the self should fail sometimes; and there is nothing that may not become an object of scandal, even the whole universe, if we fail to look on it with love.

The mystery of love is that it changes nothing in the world, which continues to exhibit the same abominations and sufferings; yet it has the power to suffuse these things with an invisible and supernatural light. When love reigns, suffering is invested with new meaning, and is relieved and slowly transformed into a joy of another order.

- Louis Lavelle († 1951) was a professor at the Sorbonne, Paris, France, and was a prominent Christian philosopher.