There are so many ways that we talk about God.  We all think about him through the context of our own thoughts and experiences.  Sacred Scripture has images and parables and analogies that help us begin to explore the infinite mystery of God.  Theologians throughout the centuries, from the apostles onward, have written millions and millions of words helping us to understand who God is.  And yet, perhaps the greatest theologian of them all, St. John, captures who God is, with one word.  God is Love.  Deus Caritas Est.  This is a truly stunning statement in its simplicity and its depth of meaning.  What does it mean?  We tend to have a very one-sided notion of what love is in our society.  We’ve talked about this before.  We see love as an emotion, as attraction, as a series of feelings.  Because of Disney movies and romantic comedies, we’ve been trained by our society to think of love as the emotion of self-fulfillment: it’s about feeling good and having my needs met, and walking off into the sunset, living happily ever after with my soul-mate in an absolutely care-free life free of conflict and problems of any kind.  

It’s true that love is an emotion, and it’s a beautiful and powerful emotion.  
It can motivate and lead us to all manner of wonderful things in our lives.  But it’s so much more.  And this is what our world has forgotten.  If God himself is love, then we look to him to see what love really is in its deepest meaning.  His commandment to us is to love one another as he has loved us.  We know that his, is the greatest act of love that the world has ever seen: the icon, the form of love, is the cross.  That wasn’t an emotionally uplifting experience for him.  But it was a moment of perfect love.  What that means is that love involves hard work, self-mastery, living a certain way: it means making selfless choices.  Love isn’t selfish: it’s not so concerned with what it “gets” out of a relationship.  True love is gift.  It’s sacrifice.  It’s fidelity.  It’s selflessness.  It’s putting the needs of others before my own.  Fundamentally, it’s a choice.  

Love is a choice.  If you remember nothing else I ever say, remember that: Love is a choice.  Though love involves emotion of course, love itself is not something that comes and goes like all emotions do: Love is a decision to live for others: it’s a decision to die for others: not necessarily physically, but to die to one’s self and one’s desires and one’s preferences: so that others, so that the ones we love, may live and may live life to the full.  It’s how good spouses continue to love each other, really, really love each other, even at those times when they don’t really like each other all that much.  It’s how good parents love their children, even when it means sacrificing enormously for their well-being.  It’s the noble love of a soldier who lays down his life for his country.  It’s the heroic love of a martyr who willingly, even joyfully goes to his death for the name of Christ.  Love is the cross.  It’s sacrifice.  And living this love is the deepest joy we could have.  

God is love, and Christ is love made flesh, and he shows us the way.  He gives us the strength to live this heroic love, strength we could never muster up on our own.  We need Christ, and we need the sacraments of the Church.  The sacraments are filled with the power of the cross, the greatest act of true love there could ever be.  We need the Eucharist especially: the body and blood of Christ: into our very beings, we invite Love Itself, Love Himself: we ask him to transform us from within, to give us the strength to live for others, to love as he has loved us.  And we know in Faith, that by embracing this sacrificial selfless love, even amid great difficulties, our joy will be complete.