Love

  How much time do you spend on your friendships, marriage, family and community?  How often do you ask yourself if you could love better in some areas of your life?  
 
       Every year on the feast of the Holy Trinity, we are reminded of the mystery of community and friendship.  Both of these great gifts in our lives come from a reflection on the nature of the Trinity - three persons, one God, each giving and receiving love from the other!  These relationships between the three Persons of the Trinity are the most intimate, most intense, most loving that anyone could ever imagine!  
 
       Our God is a community of persons and yet still only one God!  This is the ultimate mystery.  This is a mystery that we cannot even begin to understand, and yet in our own lives we know in a kind of intuitive way that, yes, this must be true.  God must be somehow a community because our own deepest needs are always calling us to love and to friendship.  We, who are made in the image of God, are called to love and to be loved.  
 
       This means that the work of building community and friendship is a sacred work.  And so, loving is the first way that we grow in the image of God.  It is so important to convince ourselves that loving is the most important thing that we can do!  If we hold it up as the one thing that we all must be about, then perhaps we will be able to really gain some balance in our lives - not putting work or efficiency, or possessions or play ahead of it!  This week, ask to know the gift of communal love!