It is 19th September 2018. We celebrate the memorial of Saint Januarius, bishop and martyr. The readings are from 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13; and the Gospel from Luke 7:31-35. Love is the inner energy for the life in totality. Very few of us attain the selfless love either by nature or by nurturing or by both. Most of us complete our lives on earth with the minimum love and expecting and extracting love from the other all the time. Love without commitment and responsibility is on the increase leading us to be selfish, lustful, consumeristic, playful, fun-loving, and obsessive in love relationships. Even though there is so much demand for affectionate love, most of us are comfortable with love that offers erotic in nature. Love has been reduced to an exchange of things, emotions, feelings and verbal or electronic messages. We are either depressed over a message that someone posted or sent and the words one has uttered in one situation or the other than celebrating the presence of the person with his/her richness and weakness. Achieving the perfect and self-transcending love means that one has made tremendous sacrifices beyond one’s failures and weaknesses in oneself and in the other one whom one attempts to love. Without embracing sacrifices, suffering, pain spontaneously and freely, one cannot celebrate the selfless love which is the crown of all attempts of loving. Erotic love, familiar love, playful love, obsessive love and self-love cannot express the full capacity of a human person. We are all eligible and capable of loving to the full and reaching affectionate, enduring and selfless love when we have consciously made attempts to deal with our selfishness, lust and greediness of our being. in the first reading, St. Paul presents us with the discourse on love explaining what is and what is not love. With the power and presence of selfless love, we experience God in human interactions. St. Paul teaches us that the supremacy of love is that makes a person’s love meaningful and fruitful. Human persons with all their charisma, the material possession, all kinds of intelligence and knowledge, even life is itself become meaningless when love is absent in one’s life. The value of a human person is in the quality of love that is expressed towards humanity. Love is not a human endeavour or effort but it is the infusion of power to participate in the quality of God. We become loving and lovable by loving and befriending God at the outset. God is the beginning and end of our love. We become at home with God only through the power of love. None of us will reach the abode of God without loving. Faith, Hope and love are gifts of God to humanity. In faith we attempt to offer ourselves to God and in hope we strive to reach the strings of love while God infuses love through the power of the Spirit of God. “There are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.” (1 Cor.13:13). The responsorial Psalm praises, “Happy the people the Lord has chosen as his own.” (Ps.32:12). The Gospel points out that without the love of God we will not able to dance to the tune of faith. It is the power of love and the expressions of selfless love that allows us to accept the message of Christ. Love cannot be bottled up by anything or anyone. It finds the way to permeate. Selfish and sinful love does not allow us to be open to the voice of the Lord. God sends a number of people in our lives to demonstrate God’s unwavering love for us yet our hearts are looking for satisfaction in something that is fleeting. May God help us to experience God’s love in our lives to love everyone as God loved us. May you have a good day. God bless you.