THE FIRE OF LOVE
We’rhe e afraid to say the word «love». It’s so compromised that there fits within it what’s best and worst, what’s most sublime and most base. Yet love is always at the source of all healthy life, awakening and making grow what’s best in us.
When love is lacking, the fire that moves life is lacking. Without love, life is extinguished, goes dormant and ends up dying. The one who doesn’t love closes herself in and gets more and more isolated. He runs around foolishly about his problems and concerns, ends up imprisoned in the traps of sex, falls into the routine of daily work: he’s lacking the motor that moves life.
Love is at the center of the Gospel, not as a law to be fulfilled with discipline, but as a «fire» that Jesus wants to see «burning» over the Earth, way beyond the passivity, mediocrity and routine of good order. According to the Prophet of Galilee, God is close to us, seeking to make the Father’s love and justice germinate, grow and bear fruit. This presence of a God who doesn’t speak of vengeance, but of passionate love and of fraternal justice, is what’s most essential to the Gospel.
Jesus contemplates the world as full of the Father’s grace and love. That creative force is like a little leaven that must ferment the mass, the lit fire that must make the whole world burn. Jesus dreams of a human family inhabited with the love and the thirst for justice. A society that passionately seeks a more dignified and happy life for all.
The great sin of Jesus’ followers will always be to let the fire go out: substituting the fire of love with religious doctrine, the order and care of cult; reducing Christianity to an abstraction clothed in ideology; letting its transforming power get lost. Yet Jesus didn’t primarily concern himself with organizing a new religion or inventing a new liturgy, but with breathing life into a «new being» (P. Tillich), the enlightening of a new person radically moved by the fire of love and justice.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
