A heart that has never known true love, or has been manipulated, wounded or abused by another when trying to love, experiences a living death. It can happen between parent and child, between husband and wife, between siblings or friends. Since these are the foundational relationships of our life, the foundations of the heart can be destroyed, chronically distorted or left bleeding with a yearning and longing which can sometimes never be met.

We talk so easily, too easily, of love. Our grasp of what true love is often falls tragically short of the truth. Today, love is used to describe such things as selfish passion, mutual manipulation and abuse, ephemeral and superficial feelings. It’s used to blackmail, to subjugate and even to enslave.

So, the assertion by St. John that God is love almost becomes as meaningless in the ears of many of our contemporaries as those forms of pseudo-love which they endorse. The question then is: what is love, true love, the love that God is before it is the love He gives?

God sent into the world His only Son so that we might have life through Him. If He came to give us life, then it means we were dead. Not so much dead in the body as dead in the heart. Our hearts were black with death, spiritual death, that is, sin. God did not send His Son because of any virtue or beauty in us. He did not come because we were inherently loveable. He did not come because we had something attractive or desirable about us. He came into our death, into our blackness, into our inner grave.

True love, then, seeks out sin, death, stony hearts, so as to substitute them with grace, holiness and life. And this love is not a feeling or affection. It is the self-surrender of God. It is the Father who surrenders his only-begotten, beloved Son. It is the Son who surrenders Life, the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who surrenders the Son back to the Father through His death on the Cross. Jesus gives up the Spirit as He prays, Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit.

To say God is love is to speak of the eternal self-surrender of the three divine Persons, one to the other, through the other and in the other. In the salvation of mankind, the Blessed Trinity pours out that inner life of self-surrender onto us, into us, through us. The Cross is where the God who is love meets loveless humanity, and “enlovens” it back to life. And to live now means, for the redeemed human being, not only to love like God, but to love with God’s own love. It means that I who believe that I am redeemed by the Cross now surrender myself in sacrifice for the eternal good of my neighbour. It means I will love selflessly the very neighbour who is in sin and death to the point that my love seeks to draw them to grace and to life. I won’t love only those who love me, for even the pagans do as much, do they not? I will not only love those I find acceptable and palatable and conformed to my outlook and wishes and preferences, but that I will seek the eternal good of my enemies, of those who hurt and offend me and even of those who might want to kill me.

In the Eucharist, the self-surrendering and self-sacrificing love of the Trinity seeks to enter and flood my heart, my memory, my mind and my body, to expel from them sin and prejudice and judgmentalism and self-righteousness. It also seeks to heal any woundedness of my soul and psyche resulting from not being loved or being hurt in love or being manipulated in love. Sometimes, when we are badly wounded psychologically, emotionally and spiritually, we can hold onto that woundedness as if it were somehow a trophy to show others and prove to them how much a victim I am. In a perverse sort of way, we can become complacent in our victimhood, and define ourselves and our self-awareness by what has tragically happened to us.

But in the face of the Cross, the Eucharist and the Trinity of love, we can no longer do that, we can no longer justify wearing our pain on our lapel as if it were a badge of honour. We must let it go. We can let it go, because the God of love is greater than all our wounds and hurts; he has borne them and killed them in His Body on the Tree that we might be free to love, free from the traumas which we can so easily use to justify our bad temper, our moodiness, our addictions and our engrained habits of sin. Christ did not die so that we might gloat over our wounds. He died so that by His wounds we might be healed and fly again like eagles in the strength and power of His mighty love.

It is difficult to let go of hurts, yes it is. But unless and until we do, we cannot honestly say that we have known the love of God or love with that love. The Cross uproots us from the contaminated soil of our brokenness and roots us into the True Vine so that the sap of the Spirit can fill us and the Father can prune us to bear abundant fruit that will last. Death is about letting go of everything that we have felt to be so certain in life, including our own self-concept. All true love will be a death to self, to the fraudulent ways in which we have related to ourselves and to others. For all true love leads to God, is God. Let us pray for the grace truly to die to all in us and around us that is not of God. Then we will know freedom, peace and the joy that no-one will ever take away from us. We will know God and be like Him.