All You Need Is Love (and coffee)

Love is patient, love is kind.
It is not jealous, love is not pompous,
it is not inflated, it is not rude,
it does not seek its own interests,
it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury,
it does not rejoice over wrongdoing
but rejoices with the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things,

hopes all things endures all things.

I am a child of the '60's and the '70's.  I guess you could have called me an undercover hippy type. I didn't appreciate all of the great rock bands of the era as much as I liked folk music.  I collected everything I could find by Peter, Paul, and Mary and other people who sang songs with a story.  It turns out that the difference between most rock pieces and most folk pieces of the era was the tempo because most of the songs were hawking love in some shape or form.  Of course, the love that they were selling was the eros kind of love, the physical love of procreation figures highly in the lyrics of the age.  That kind of makes sense too because we Americans speak a language that has only one obvious definition of the word love with us having to glean the other types of love our Greek ancestors spoke about by analyzing the context the word is found in.  The children of the period could not be bothered to engage in such things analyzing context because they were too busy with the procreation thing!  Americans of the current age are not much further along when it comes to the word "love."  Love for most of us is a feeling.  It is the feeling we get when we meet the one whom we feel a part of. We feel this procreative type of love at the beginning of every relationship that we find ourselves in.  It is a very strong, deep, and emotional feeling.  It burns very hotly and it does have a tendency to weaken, sometimes rather quickly, and we say that "we have fallen out of love."   Well, this love that we can and do fall out of is called Eros and its purpose is to ensure that the human race continues by making procreation a much-beloved activity.  But eros is not the be-all and end-all of love.  If it was, human beings would be like a herd of any animals, rutting, and mating just for creating new humans.  But we humans engage in this activity even when age makes it impossible to create new life so there must be another thing at work here.  

When the time for procreation is over we still love our mate but our love evolves.  We still have the eros in our life but we turn to love that lasts forever.  Agape love, the love of eternity. We love the person for their spirituality and even if the excitement of those first few months together or even first few years has faded, we still look at the person and we see the good that God has put there and it is this goodness that we saw above the eros love that excited our bodies.  This agape love is what keeps us together and it is the kind of love that is not self-serving.  It is the kind of love that makes us a servant to the one that we love and it keeps us together from first blush to end of life.   Read what Paul says about love and do not worry if, in your particular relationship that first feeling of eros has disappeared and is only a memory, it is agape love, the love that binds one spirit to another that will win the day. 

Oh, I forgot, you need one more thing, especially in the morning and that is a hot cup of coffee to chase the night and the cobwebs away.   Peace and Joy to you and yours this day. 

Purgatory - you know what I am going to ask so why don't just resolve to do it...pray for the poor souls in Purgatory today.