A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Our lord said to his disciples, this is just a continuation of the readings we've been having. This is my commandment, our lord says. Love one another as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer speak to you as slaves, for a slave doesn't know what his master is about. Instead, I call you friends. Since I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my father, It was not you who chose me, it was I who chose you to go forth and to bear fruit. Your fruit must endure so that everything you ask the father in my name, he will give you.
The command I give you is this, that you love one another, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. As some of you know, I have tried to establish a society, an association to eliminate the word love from the English language. And so far, I the census of our last meeting was one. I dialogued with myself.
If you will take the time, you say that's foolishness. Is it? Remember, words are supposed to have significance. Words are signs. That's all they are.
They have they have meaning only in so far as somebody with an intelligence interprets the sign. If you go down here and leave 495, and you wanna go to New York and you come to a intersection where there are eight roads coming in, and there are eight eight signs all reading New York, North, South, East, and West, you'll say, this is nonsense. These signs are meaningless. They are pointing to three hundred and sixty degrees, the whole booming compass. Well, the word love in the English language, which is to only assign in English, you write it or you scribble it or you put it on a computer or something.
It's only a sign. And do you know, ma'am, how many significations it has in English? Well, I ask you to go to the library over in Democracy Boulevard, whatever it's called, and look up the Honor Bridge, Oxford dictionary, look up the word love. If it's the first edition, there will be 13 columns. 13 columns.
Two columns to a page, that in the English language, when that was published several years ago, that's what the the scholars discovered the use of the word love in English incorporated, in actual use, past and present. 13 columns. So you have a sign with meanings pointing to 13 columns of meanings. Now there's a second edition of the Oxford Under Bridge Dignity Dictionary, which I have not seen, so I don't know how many columns there are in the newer the new newer edition. But I know in the old first one, there were 13.
So I ask you, when you can talk about the love of God and how God loves me and see two ducks mating on the water and see, look how they love each other, they're making love, there's something wrong with the sign of the English word love. Obvious. It's meaningless. Now, C. S.
Lewis, one of his more important books, is called The Four Love. Notice, he distinguishes four, only four. And you can't argue with usage. If it's if the word is used, it's used. That's all.
We don't have any academy in The United States to to control that. The French do. But we don't. The word is used, gets slapped into a dictionary if it's used often enough, like the word ain't, or the two words or whatever you want to call it. Lewis, C.
S. Lewis, he distinguished four kinds. The first one was the bond in a family. He called that affection. Then he distinguishes the bond between friends, which he called philia.
Now notice, that kind of love we almost ignore today because the word friend is thrown around, people meet each other for the first time and they're on a not only on the first name basis but they're on the second name basis within minutes and they have friends. But Lewis talks about that second kind of love which he makes very most important he traces it down through the Iliad, the Odyssey and all that. But that is the love between people who are not blood relations, who are not legally related in the in the bigger family, but who have this bond of the holy word friendship, which Aquinas makes a great deal of. He makes a great deal of that. Now the third kind that Lewis distinguishes is the one attached to sex.
But he distinguishes two kinds there. He distinguishes what we in English and in the Western world call romantic love. We all know what I hope you all know what that means. You had it when you were about 17 or 18 years old. I hope.
It's a great thrill. Where you meet the person of the opposite sex and you know life is going to be absolute that this person, male or female depending on what you I hope it was a heterosexual relationship. But anyway, this person becomes an ideal, you know, it's Dante's and his little old friend and all the rest of it. It. Then but he Lewis distinguishes that from sex, which he calls eros or venereal.
Then, and he's leading up to this, as against those three kinds the love within the family, the love of friends, and the love based upon sex which may be that highly romanticized, ennobling, you know, the thing of the well, romantic love, that's as good a word as I know. And then that's often attached, as he says, that often becomes venereal. Well, there's nothing wrong with that. It winds up in a holy and sacred state of matrimony. Then he comes to the fourth time.
Now what do you want to call this? Because it's absolutely different from the other three. Absolutely different. So if that's true, then we should have a separate word for it. Well, we try, but none of the words have taken.
So that is the love that god has for me and that I ought to have for god. But they're not the same either, obviously. There are no emotions in god. There's no sentiments in God. There's no movement in God.
And yet you say, loves me. I never will forget, not so long ago, a mother came and said, you know what my little son asked me today? Why did God make the world? Well, that's a very simple answer because he loved the world and he loved you. Well, when when you're talking about love there, you certainly are talking about something different than when I say, god, I love you, or when you say to your spouse, I love you, or when you say to your friend, I love you, if you say it.
So what do you what does our lord mean here? What's the word love here mean? What does it actually mean? As far as god is concerned, it can't be this this emotional emotional sentimental sentimental stuff that we have, which is very good. I'm not because we are not separated spirits.
We are not pure souls. We are human beings, and we act as a unit. And the emotions, the sentiments, feelings, these are rightfully important. But are they the standard of loving God? Are they the standard for the measure of my loving my neighbor or my enemy or that, as Lewis pointed out, that person who sits with me next in church who stinks and sings or tries to sing and smells after tobacco?
How about? See, we ought to get these some of these things straight in our mind. There can't be any emotion that regards God. And in many instances, I am commanded, commanded to love even those who are repulsive. You know, somebody oh, I I think it was well, I don't know.
But, anyway, somebody asked Mother Teresa, How can you love these people you're picking up off the streets? They are absolutely repulsive to every sensibility, to the eyes, the ears, the nose, perhaps even to the taste because she kissed them. And she says, I I don't love them. I love God. Now, here's a play upon that word love again.
You it certainly has not a univocal meaning when she talks about loving that that dying, disease ridden, repulsive thing human being redeemed by Christ from the gutter and says, because I love God, I love it. See, now that's straight thinking. That is absolutely straight thinking. God doesn't ask ask us to love our neighbor. He doesn't ask us to love our neighbor because we find them attractive or desirable or that they are useful.
Aristotle goes into this, you know, in his Nicomachean Ethics in that in his famous two books on friendship. One fifth of the whole book. But that is not the relationship between me and God. What is it? What is it?
Well, it isn't something that's very exciting, but it's something heroic to do, and that is keep his commandments. It's what our lord said. Keep my commandments. That's not easy. It's not exciting.
It's not glamorous. Sometimes it's most repulsive. Believe me. Because everything in our whole being wants to break them. Think what we read in that first reading today.
Everything in our being goes out and wants me to commit adultery or fornication or to steal or or something. Everything. And yet, I have to love God more than that. It's not easy. But as far as I know, that's what the word love means when I'm talking about God, obedience and perseverance.
In the name of the father, the son, holy spirit. Amen.