Love: What does it all mean?

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West Ham beating Spurs, Haribo, strictly come dancing, Chocolate cake, going for a walk on the sea front, a good game of rugby, reading a book, listening to music, going to the theatre, My Friends, my family and God. These are the things that I love or love to do. We use the word love for so many different things. 

But to unlock  this Gospel we need to look more closely at the word love first. For as I have demonstrated the word love is one of the most overused word in the English language and when we use it is has so many different meanings. We can all list the things that we love and the way that we place a different meaning on each different item. My love for example for Chocolate cake is different to the love of my parents or a partner but yet we use the same word. When we look at the Greek word it surprisingly has 6 different meanings. So you can see how complicated it can become. Don’t worry I am not going to go through them now thats for you to have a look at yourselves. 

And yet there seems to be in society today a lack of what actually love means. We have confused the word and what it means to us. We have replaced it with a kind of self love that is destructive because we have forgotten what real love is we have hidden behind social media, alcohol,    hedonistic behaviour and then push those who really care about us away. 

These behaviours come out of fear. They come out of a lack of love for self true love of self they come because we are not free to love. God loves us he wants us to live with true love. This means that we are no longer frightened we are no longer afraid of the beauty of what God has made out of love that is oursleves. In this love that God has for us we are open and generous to the stranger the lost and disposed.  Our love comes from the self  BUT looking outwards to others. 

This journey to discover God’s love is the only true self esteem that we need for self esteem comes from knowing that God loves us that he is close to us that he is with us. 


I can hear you say that I know this already and I would say yes of course on an intellectual level we know that God loves us we read it in the bible we are told about it.  But we live in a world where experience matters The Eucharist is about God giving his very self to us. The sacrament of reconciliation is a sacrament of God healing forgiveness and love. But this is not enough this is just the start we need to experience his love. I know that God loves me I have experienced his love his grace in others concern but also in prayer. To let go of fear and let God in freedom of his love. And when we love in freedom without fear we truly live in God’s love in the great musical Les mis it says to love another person is to see the face of God But then also we need to pray to God who loves us very much and in the day to day anxieties and the world around us with its warped idea of love we have to remind ourselves constantly so we can say the prayer of the hand. God loves me very much. 

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