Love According to a Church Sermon

Love these days is the most abused word in the English vocabulary. We throw the term "love" around quite loosely. We hear it in songs. We see it in the movies. There's romantic love, there's platonic love, there's Godly love, there's also love for inanimate objects (i.e. I love my car. I loved that burger).

There's love as equated to sex. The term "to make love" would come from that association. But seeing as how widely accepted one-night-stands are these days or unwanted pregnancy for that matter, I guess it's safe to say love is more than that physical connection. Sex and love do not mean the same thing. One may follow the other or it may not. Nevertheless they are two separate concepts.

The most common use of love though is in terms of feeling/ emotion. And this might be a little true in the beginning. Feelings may dictate how we interact with people on a peripheral level, but again love is more than that initial liking.

According to this Catholic priest who presided over my cousin's wedding (and I am by no means Catholic, but I do believe this was indeed an enlightened man.) love is not because of how a person looks or what a person does. Love is accepting another person for who he/she is. Love is a commitment to willingly care for another individual more than one's self.

When we claim that we "love," we willingly commit ourselves to caring about somebody else despite of how we feel at different times of the day or at different points in our lives. Even if sometimes we are angry or tired, and don't feel like loving, we have implicitly promised to do so.

And this is what makes a wedding meaningful in any setting.

Because when two people are wed, in a civil wedding for example, two people show their commitment in the form of a binding legal contract. While in a church wedding, it is even considered much more valuable by a number of Christian communities around the world because this commitment is made in front of God (in God's house).

When couples separate it is then not accurate to say people fall "out of love" because if you love in the bond of matrimony, you vow to do so for better or for poorer, in sickness and in health... 'Til death do you part regardless of your spouse's psychological incapacity or what-not.

I'm not against divorce when everyone is better off than being forced to stay together in an unhappy home. Plain to see there would be no love there anyway.

But to echo the priest, marriage shouldn't be taken so lightly. It is not recourse for an unwanted pregnancy or an overflowing attraction or any other petty reason that won't keep the couple together. Love is not measured by how grand or how successful the wedding. But how you grow old together and survive the marriage that comes after.