“True love,. O Lord, is yours.”

There is no word we use more here on earth than the word “love”. Love is the highest aspiration, the noblest thought, the deepest pleasure of humans on earth. And yet there is no word more misused than “love”. It is made to stand for base passions and fleeting feelings, it is stained with infidelity and marred by violence. Good men and women have to refrain from using the word to avoid its unhappy connotations.

Even when I come to religion and prayer and my relationship with you, Lord, I do use the word “love”, I am emboldened by your grace and your benevolence to say “I love you”, and yet I realise how little I say when I say that, what an inconstant thing my love is, how unreliable, how superficial, how weak. I see the limitations and imperfections of my love, and I also feel inclined to abstain from using the word. I don’t find true love on earth, not even in my own heart.

That is why it now fills me with consolation to realise that somewhere at least I can find true love, and that is in you, Lord. “True love, O Lord, is yours”. In fact that is your very essence, your definition. You are love, you are the only true love, pure, firm, eternal. I can now pronounce the word and recover its value. I can now believe in love because I believe in you. I can renew my hope and regain my courage to love, because I know there is one true love, and that is close to me.

I now can love because I believe in your love. I know and I sense myself loved with the only true love that exists, your own eternal love. And that gives me the strength and the confidence to go out myself in love, to you first, and then in you and through you to all those you put close to me in my life. True love is yours Lord, and in faith and humility I make it now my own to love all in your name.