Am I or am I not in love?

From Inside Catholic by Alice Von Hildebrand

We live in an age of confusion. It might even be said that we major not only in intellectual confusions but in affective confusions as well. Many do not know how to gauge their emotions; they cannot distinguish between valid and invalid feelings. They do not know for certain whether they are truly in love or whether they are animated by wishful thinking and believe themselves in love because they crave the excitement that love gives. They confuse "loving" with having a crush, or "discerning" forever without coming to a decision.

Far from claiming that I can answer this question, all I aim to do is offer some "signposts" that might be helpful when people ask the question: Am I or am I not in love? Great experiences usually come as a surprise -- incredible gifts that are in no way the fruit of wile or planning. They overwhelm us, and our first response is: "I am not worthy of such a gift. He (or she) is so much better than myself." Our hearts are overcome with gratitude, a gratitude that makes us humble. We feel unworthy of such a gift, which seems to awaken us from a deep sleep. No doubt, the person in love "truly starts living." The person who has never loved lives in a state of somnambulism and moves about as an automaton fulfilling his daily duties with dullness of heart -- a heart that does not seem to beat.

When in love, we experience a deep, profound joy -- a joy that is both ardent and calm, like a burning bush; but this ardor is not destructive, and is marked by deep recollection. It springs from the very center of our being. How different from the loud excitement of those who experience violent emotions that do not come from their depths and, like a straw fire, shine brightly for a short while but are soon extinguished.

The heart is not only on fire, but this fire has a melting effect. We feel as if a goodness that does not come from within has taken hold of us. Dietrich von Hildebrand speaks of "fluid goodness" of a loving heart.


True love makes the lover more beautiful; he irradiates joy. If this is not the case, we can raise doubts as to whether he is truly in love. One says in French: "Un saint triste est un triste saint" -- a sad saint is a pitiful saint. Similarly, a sad "lover" should question whether he truly loves. Small, modest duties are done joyfully, because either they are done "with him" or "with her," or because they become acts of loving service.

True love makes one humble. All of a sudden our weakness, misery, and imperfection flash up before our minds, but with no depressing effect. We see our mistakes with the wish to unveil them to the loved one, and this unveiling is coupled with the wish to beg for his or her help in order to overcome them. We wish to unveil ourselves spiritually in a chaste way, to be truly known by the person we love; we fear to cheat our beloved into believing that we are better than we truly are. We feel that the loved one is entitled to know both our "valid name" and its caricature.

Love is also linked to a holy realism. The beauty of the loved one appears in front of us, but with no illusion; his beauty is not a fruit of wishful thinking, but a real vision -- as on Mount Tabor -- that the lover will have to remain faithful to, to hold on to when the vision is inevitably dimmed by the dullness of everyday duties.

The lover will always be willing to give the loved one what Dietrich von Hildebrand calls "the credit of love" -- that is, when the loved one acts in a way that we do not understand or is a disappointment to us, instead of condemning him, the lover will trust that, human life being as complex as it is, his actions may be justified, even though at first glance they strike us as regrettable. The true lover eagerly looks for "excuses" when the conduct of the one he loves is a disappointment. He carefully refrains from being overconfident in blaming the other's conduct, baffling as it might be at first sight. He rejoices upon discovering that he was mistaken.

How sad it is in Shakespeare's play Cymbeline when Posthumus, being informed by the scoundrel Iachimo that his wife, Imogene, had betrayed him, believes the slanderer, even though he had ample previous evidence that she loved him and was pure. The play has a happy ending, but it sketches powerfully the bitterness, rage, and despair of someone who is convinced that the one he loved, the one whose image was the source of his joy, has betrayed him.


We can say that we truly love when a loved one's impatience, ingratitude, or "rudeness" (in other words, when his true beauty is veiled) cause us greater grief because he is staining his beautiful garment and presenting us with a caricature of his true face, rather than because he has wounded us. Most of all, the true lover is grieved because the loved one has offended God. On the order of importance, the offense against God is the primary source of sorrow; the harm that he does to his own beloved soul is second; last -- even though deeply painful -- is the wound he inflicts upon the one who loves him so deeply.

The true lover is more concerned about the interests of his loved one -- whatever truly benefits his beloved's soul -- than about his own. Hence the readiness to make sacrifices for him in the very many little things of daily life in which people's tastes differ: a very warm room or a cool one; eating at home or in a restaurant; going to a soccer game or staying home; watching a television program when one's spouse wishes to watch another one, and so on. Yielding should be limited to cases of subjective preferences, of course, and should never extend to principles. Still, we all know spouses often ill-treated by their husbands (or wives) who are so concerned about the eternal welfare of the loved one that they accept all these sufferings, offering them up for his or her sake.


A great sign of true love is the loving patience that one has toward the weaknesses of the beloved. It can be his idiosyncrasies, his temperament, his mannerisms (we all have them); it can be his physical frailties, his psychological oddities, his intellectual inability to follow a straight line of reasoning; his disorder, or his fanaticism for order. If a monk is constantly given occasions to "die to his own will" (as St. Benedict says), the same is true of marriages. John Henry Cardinal Newman writes that even in the deepest human relationships, when love is authentic, life in common will give one plenty of opportunities to prove one's love by sacrificing one's preferences.

Mannerisms, idiosyncrasies, moods; physical, psychological, and intellectual weaknesses are either interpreted as positively as possible or are borne with patience. Benedict writes about monks striving for holiness who nevertheless almost inevitably cause irritation for those living close to them. "Let them bear with the greatest patience one another's infirmities, whether of body or character" (Holy Rule, chapter 72).

The History of a Soul, from this point of view, is also a spiritual treasure. St. Thérèse of Lisieux clearly suffered much from the lack of education and manners in some of the other nuns. She learned the holy art of using every single irritation for God's glory, including the nerve-racking noise that a sister made in the stall next to hers, which prevented her from praying and being recollected. Still, Thérèse emerged victorious through love.

Surprisingly, this can also bring happiness to the best of marriages, even though the being we love has wounded our hearts. A true lover whose love is baptized will use these insignificant sacrifices as they did in the Middle Ages, when artists used some bits of wool to make superb tapestries.

The true lover always has the word "thank you" on his tongue. It is also easy for him to say "forgive me," for in the best relationship, one inevitably falls into mistakes. If someone imagines that he can find himself in a situation in which he will never make a mistake, that person should not get married, or have children, or enter a convent. The holy art of living is to know that we will make mistakes, to recognize them, to repent, and, with God's grace, to have the readiness to change. Simultaneously, it is important that both lovers recognize their mistakes. We all know cases in which one of the lovers is always critical of the other and easily forgets that "the readiness to change" should be reciprocal, and that he too is affected by original sin.

Another characteristic of true love is that the loved one is "superactually" always with us; he is there, even when we are busy or absorbed by some duty. He creates the framework of our thoughts (after God). Just as faith in God and love of God should always be the background of all our thoughts and actions, the loved one is always with us; that is, everything that occurs is never unrelated to our love.The lover feels a holy urge to say "thank you" and "forgive me." It flows from his heart without effort. The true lover experiences the deep truth of the words in the Canticle of Canticles: "If a man were to give the whole substance of his house for love, he would despise it as nothing."

Motivated by love, speak the truth

From Catholic Womanhood

We live in a world that prides itself on allowing each person to have his or her own “truth,” a world where somehow, mysteriously, everyone can be in the right, all of the time, and there are no absolute or objective truths.

This idea is most commonly known as relativism, and Catholic theologians continue to strongly denounce it. Pope Benedict, then as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, stated in 2005 that “We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.”

As anyone who has ever been a teenager can attest, young people are particularly swayed by their egos and desires. Simply, they like to do what they want. As serious Catholics know, allowing our lives to be ruled by selfish impulses results in an emptiness that can only be filled by knowing and loving the Lord, who is the “Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). However, under the “dictatorship of relativism,” the youth of today fall into the comfortable, if unsatisfying, belief that everyone can be right and no one can be wrong.

Today, the relativistic beliefs of the young often persist into adulthood, while those who have strong convictions and stand up for them are seen as single-minded fundamentalists who need to become more “tolerant.”

In my role a youth minister and high school theology teacher, I hear the opinions of young people on a daily basis. Understandably, many young people object to the so-called difficult Church teachings on pre-marital sex, contraception, and even sacramental issues because they do not fully understand the reasoning behind the Church's positions. Young people need to be told, boldly and unapologetically, the effects of buying into the world's empty promises, and the real and true happiness that comes from following Christ, but in an approachable way that they can understand.

However, sometimes I find that boldly proclaiming the truth is easier said than done. Working with teenagers is a difficult balance of relating with them and their experiences, “engaging the culture,” and giving them the truth that they really need to hear. It is easy to get caught up with forming friendships with the youth and come dangerously close to forgetting the purpose of our work. I've formed great relationships with the teens in my youth group, but calling them out on real issues has yet to become my strong suit, especially when so many young people believe that moral absolutes are a matter of opinion.

Recently, a discussion on the importance of attending Sunday Mass came up at a youth group meeting. A girl mentioned to me that she rarely attended Sunday Mass. She gave the timeless excuses of being too busy, not having a ride, and never going with her family. Since Sunday Mass is a non-negotiable issue for Catholics, missing it for anything other than a grave reason is a mortal sin. But, as I looked back into the excited face of a girl who had been diligently attending youth group, Bible study, and helping to lead retreats, I was faced with the almost insurmountable challenge of calling her out on it.

Very few people actually enjoy telling people they care about that they are objectively wrong about an opinion or a practice, especially when our culture tells us that disagreeing with someone on a moral issue makes us intolerant. We're afraid of rejection, of doing more harm than good in telling someone the truth. After a few deep breaths, I told my young friend, firmly, that if she was serious about living a Christian life she had to go to Confession and start going to Sunday Mass every week.

Although I did not enjoy this conversation, God knew what he was doing when He told us, through the words of St. Paul, to “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15).

My young friend is not only attending Sunday Mass every week, but started bringing her family members, and goes to daily Mass before school whenever she can. In my human weakness, and fear of rejection, I was so afraid of what my youth group teen would think of me, that for a second I lost sight of who I am doing this for. Pope Benedict tells us, “Do not be afraid to talk of God and to manifest without fear the signs of faith, letting the light of Christ shine in the presence of the people of today.”

This especially applies to parents of teenagers and those who work with young people. Teens are faced with the lies of the world every single day. We cannot be afraid to tell them what they need to hear, motivated by love, and convicted by the truth found in the person of Jesus Christ.

The meaning of love?

from marysaggies.blogspot.com

Saints answer the question:

"It is love alone that counts."
-St. Therese

"Little things done out of love are those that charm the Heart of Christ… On the contrary, the most brilliant deeds, when done without love, are but nothingness."
-St. Therese

"True love is found only in complete self-forgetfulness, and it is only after we have detached ourselves from every creature that we find Jesus."
-St. Therese

"What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like."
-St. Augustine

"Love is the most necessary of all virtues. Love in the person who preaches the word of God is like fire in a musket. If a person were to throw a bullet with his hands, he would hardly make a dent in anything; but if the person takes the same bullet and ignites some gunpowder behind it, it can kill. It is much the same with the word of God. If it is spoken by someone who is filled with the fire of charity - the fire of love of God and neighbor - it will work wonders."
-St. Anthony Mary Claret

"The proof of love is to suffer for the one you love."
-St. Padre Pio

"You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working, and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves."
-St. Francis de Sales

"What is the mark of love for your neighbor? Not to seek what is for your own benefit, but what is for the benefit of the one loved, both in body and in soul."
-St. Basil the Great

"When you look at the crucifix, you understand how much Jesus loved you then. When you look at the Sacred Host, you understand how much Jesus loves you now."
-Mother Teresa

"We can cure physical diseases with medicine but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more who are dying for a little love. Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So spread love everywhere you go."
-Mother Teresa

"Do not forget that true love sets no conditions; it does not calculate or complain, but simply loves."
-John Paul II

"We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God´s compassionate love for others. "
-St. Clare of Assisi

"The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things. But when it ceases to act, it ceases to exist."
-St. Gregory the Great

Nothing Like Jesus

A powerful illustration that reminds us that we must break out into the world with our love!

Recognizing the Divine Through Another

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from Huffington Post..

Many believe that the highest expression and experience we can attain in life is to love one another. Yet love is highly misunderstood. There is great confusion about the causation of love and the ways in which we are one and those that separate us.

When we "fall in love" with someone, it is often experienced as an instant affection for them -- almost a chemical occurrence. One minute it didn't exist, and the next it seems to exist more than anything else. It is delicious and we want more, so we focus more and more of our attention on this one person and want them to do more and more of whatever we think caused us to have this experience. What we commonly refer to as "love," whether as lovers, parent and child, or friends, is really a very spiritual experience that we mistakenly delimit to our relationship with the person with whom we are having this experience. In fact, love is the human experience of the divine. As John-Roger explains it:

As we are looking for ourselves, we often see ourselves in others who are open to reflect. We then love them, not just for who they are, but for that reflection of our love in them. What we're really saying is, "When I'm with you, that place inside of me that is loving awakens."

When this kind of love is experienced between two people, four things are happening simultaneously. Each is choosing to give love to the other, and each is choosing to receive love from the other. We are both open to the flow of giving and receiving love. At its best, when none of these four actions is blocked by self-imposed limitations, whether with one's partner or a total stranger, there is a transcendent experience into a oneness that is beyond earthly concerns. Consider the awe when a parent first looks into the eyes of his or her newborn child, or when in "Avatar" the Na'vi say, "I see you," meaning, "I see the god in you."

When we don't realize that love is a recognition of the divine through another, we falsely attribute the source of love simply to that person. We might fixate on wanting more of that person when in fact what we really want is more experiences of transcendence, of God. Attributing the source of love to the other person is simply a misunderstanding of the causation. When we limit ourselves to looking only for romantic love, we miss the point.

Building upon that misunderstanding of the true nature of love, we zero in on that one person and attempt to stimulate those loving feelings. We develop a conscious and often unconscious agenda of wanting them to behave in ways that we believe are the cause of our transcendent experience. When we take this path, our love often becomes exclusionary and conditioned by our personal preferences and prejudices. Our love flows exclusively with this person but not with others, and we tend to trap each other in a web of expectations. When we look for love on websites, we want our prospective partner to be of a certain age, to have a certain body type and to share our likes and dislikes -- all the things that we think will bring us to that transcendent experience. We think that if they are a match, they will be capable of igniting those feelings in us.

Truly loving another person with a capital "L" is a matter of freeing the other person of the responsibility to express his or her love for us only in the ways that we want to receive it. When we truly love, we get out of our own way by dropping all the concerns of our ego and allowing the pure radiance of the divine to shine through us to another. When the other person does that as well, the result is a pure and blissful experience of our own divinity reflected through another into a shared oneness.

I think we should all strive to be ambassadors of love with a capital "L" with as many people as possible, through our willingness to smile at a complete stranger as an offer of momentary transcendence as we pass each other by on the street; by calling to be of service to a friend who is facing a difficult time; and by choosing to sacrifice our petty judgments, expectations and any other ways that we have learned to withhold our loving kindness from others each day. It is a practice of becoming a safe and neutral place in which both our humanity and our divinity can dwell. It is through these actions that the place inside us that is loving awakens.

Perhaps this is truly what is meant in Matthew 18:20: "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." We experience God's presence in the context of our everyday relationships with others. It is a reflective process. When we delight in another, what is actually happening is we are having a pure experience of oneness that transcends all our judgments and our demands that another person be how we want them to be. We have raised our consciousness up above earthly considerations, and that is indeed a divine experience.

h/t Judith Johnson

Kindness is Not the Same as Love

A post from the Archdiocese of Washington blog...

In yesterday’s post we pondered that being holy is more than being nice. Today we do well to ponder that that being loving is not the same as being kind. Here too we live in a reductionist culture that has tended to reduce love to kindness. The results are often quite problematic as we shall see.

Kindness is a very great thing and has an important place in our relationships. Kindness is evidenced by goodness and charitable behavior, a  pleasantness, tenderness and concern for others.  According to Aristotle, kindness is an emotion manifesting itself by the desire to help somebody in need, without expecting anything in return. Peter Kreeft defines kindness as “sympathy, with the desire to relieve another’s suffering.” [Envoy Magazine, Vol 9.3, p. 20]

However, as Kreeft himself notes,  it is a very great mistake to equate kindness with love. Kindness is an aspect of love, but it is necessarily distinct from love. For is sometimes happens that love, which wills what is best for the other, may deem it best not to remove all suffering. A father, in fact may impose punishment on a child out of love. Kindness generally seeks to alleviate suffering and negativity. Love understands that suffering often has a salvific role. My parents disciplined me out of love. Had they been merely kind to me, I would likely have been spoiled, undisciplined and ill-equipped for life.

Paradoxically the more we love the more we will often see mere kindness diminish. Consider how kind we can be to strangers. We may sometimes give money to strangers with little questions asked. But if a son or daughter asks for money we may often want to know why and, even if we give it, we will frequently lecture them about being more responsible with their money. The interaction may be less kind, but it may also be more loving for it seeks to end the problem rather than merely relieve the symptom of the problem.

The good eclipses the best – And herein lies the danger of reducing love to kindness. In simply seeking to alleviate the suffering of the moment or to give people what they want, many deeper issues go unresolved and worsen. Welfare has created a slavish dependence for many in our culture. And it  is not just the poor in our cities. There is corporate welfare, and many other subsidies and entitlements that too many can no longer go without.  Rather than addressing the root causes of poverty, dependence or poor economic conditions and bad business models,  kindness interrupts love’s deeper role and treats only the suffering of the moment. In this sense the merely good (kindness)  replaces the truly best (Love). True love gives what is best, not merely what is immediately preferred.

Further, Many false expectations are centered in the exaltation of kindness over love. Generally this is manifest in the fact that suffering of any kind is seen as obnoxious and even the cause for legal action. It has also led to our demands for comfort to go on steroids. Demand for euthanasia flow from this sort of thinking as well.

A final and very terrible effect often flows from mistaking mere kindness for love is that it disposes many towards atheism. Here I simply want to quote Peter Kreeft because he says it so well

It is painfully obvious that God is not mere kindness, for He does not remove all suffering, though He has the power to do so. Indeed, this very fact — that the God who is omnipotent and can, at any instant, miraculously erase all suffering from the world, deliberately chooses not to do so —  is the commonest argument that unbelievers use against him. The number one argument for atheism stems from the confusion between love and kindness. [Peter Kreeft, Envoy Magazine, Vol 9.3, p. 20]

Kindness is a very great attribute and it surely has its place. But we must carefully distinguish it from love. Exalting kindness over love amounts to a denial of the wisdom of the Cross. Kindness focuses on comfort and alleviating suffering and this is a very great thing. But love is greater thing for it wills what is best, not what is merely desired.

Please note this is not a blog against kindness, only an attempt to distinguish and to subsume kindness under love. But kindness is an important and necessary virtue. This video is a beautiful story of how kindness is also tied to sacrificial love.

h/t Msgr. Charles Pope