How is the love of God made incarnate in your love for people, especially the unlovable? - Daily Reflections March 8,2014

LOVE IS REAL   Do you remember that old cartoon strip where a cranky and obnoxious individual claimed, “I love humanity! It’s people that I hate”?        If I ask for a raise of hands, I’m sure everyone reading this will profess love for humanity. But humanity is faceless, a theory, an abstraction, and so it is easy to love it. People are real, that’s why we hate them.        Read today’s First Reading from the Prophet Isaiah and you will see that it is a call to love people, not humanity. We are called to bring comfort to the oppressed, bread for the hungry, healing for the afflicted. In today’s Gospel, Jesus brings the invitation a notch higher: We are to love even the unlovable.        The lesson is clear. Love is not only an emotion; it is a decision. Love is not only a function of the heart; it is a function of the will. Love becomes love only when incarnated by acts seeking the good of another.       This should not be a surprise coming from Jesus. He is God incarnate (from the Latin in carne:in the flesh). A poet once said that man cannot genuinely love that which he cannot put his arms around. That is why God became man, that we might be able to put our arms around Him.        One grows in charity especially when our love is challenged — when we need to love the unlovable, the unkempt, those who have hurt us. In the minimum, loving the unlovable simply means — as Aquinas defines love — seeking the good of the other. When you think of the person who has hurt you and still earnestly wish and pray that he be enlightened and converted, that is seeking the good of the other. Even when you have to hail the other in court and possibly in jail as a demand of justice, but still wish that he ends up living his life in friendship with God, that is seeking the good of the other. Even in the absence of pleasant feelings and sentiments towards the other, you can still love the other, for love is not an emotion but a decision to wish the good of the other. It is difficult but not impossible. That’s why we need to pray for and inspire one another. Fr. Joel Jason   REFLECTION QUESTION: How is the love of God made incarnate in your love for people, especially the unlovable?   Grant me Your heart, Lord, that I may love as You love.