Love: a Commitment? or a Risk?"

Saint Valentine's Day offers us the opportunity to show our appreciation to those we love and care for. The celebration of this day has most certainly augmented the income of the retail industry: buying of cards, decorations, flowers, chocolates and other delectable delights, etc. as well as more expensive gifts for that special person in our lives.

While reflecting on the meaning of this day, I pondered on the meaning of love: God's unconditional love for me, my parents' love for me, my love of myself, those who love me and those I love, my consecration as an SNJM sister and so on. Indeed, it is all a mystery.

The following article speaks of relationships, friendships, personal disclosure, mutual respect and freedom. How many true, deep friendships can a person have? It is a big risk!

Without the solitude of heart, our relationships with others easily become needy and greedy, sticky and clingy, dependent, and sentimental, exploitive and parasitic, because without the solitude of heart, we cannot experience the others as different from ourselves but only as people who can be used for the fulfillment of our own, often hidden needs.

The mystery of love is that it protects and respects the aloneness of the other and creates the free space where we can convert our loneliness into a solitude that can be shared. In this solitude we can strengthen each other by mutual respect, by careful consideration of each other's individuality, by an obedient distance from each other's privacy and by a reverent understanding of the sacredness of the human heart.

In this solitude we encourage each other to enter into the silence of our inner­most being and discover there the voice that calls us beyond the limits of human togetherness to a new communion. In this solitude we can slowly become aware of a presence of him who embraces friends and lovers and offers us the freedom to love each other, “because he loved us first” (1 Jn 4:19). The Mystery of Love, “Mornings with Henri J. M. Nouwen” compiled by Evelyn Bence 1997 , Servant Publications p. 23

Sr. Pat O'Neill, SNJM