Love beyond affection But is this an adequate description of love? Love cannot be reduced to an ephemeral emotion. True, It isn’t very long after the sun sets on December 25 it engages our affectivity, but in order to open it to that merchants begin to roll out the Valentine’s Day the beloved and thus to blaze a trail leading away boxes of candy and the heart-shaped greeting cards from self-centeredness and towards another waxing eloquent about love. For those of us intent person, in order to build a lasting relationship; love on celebrating a full Christmas Season, it is a little aims at union with the beloved. Here we begin to bit annoying. see how love requires truth. Only to the extent that love is grounded in truth can it endure over time, The Daily Masses of those few weeks of the can it transcend the passing moment and be Christmas Season, from which we just emerged, sufficiently solid to sustain a shared journey. If love included a series of readings from the First Letter of is not tied to truth, it falls prey to fickle emotions John. It is in that letter that love is predicated of and cannot stand the test of time. True love, on the God in a most absolute way: “God is Love.” From other hand, unifies all the elements of our person this, the evangelist launches on an extended and becomes a new light pointing the way to a great reflection of love as the essential character of and fulfilled life. Without truth, love is incapable of Christian Discipleship and, even, mutual love as the establishing a firm bond; it cannot liberate our way of making God present in the world. isolated ego or redeem it from the fleeting moment in order to create life and bear fruit. The problem with “love talk” is that it is so easily dismissed or sentimentalized. There is an almost absolute, and therefore debilitating, association of love with feelings. I call this association “debilitating” because, as we all know, feelings aren’t very reliable. We feel all sorts of things on a daily basis which aren’t necessarily reflective of the truth of things. Dread can often be a result of an anxiety condition with no real reason. We often dismiss teenage “love” as naïve “puppy love:” Such isn’t to dismiss these early experiences of attraction and affection; but mature people recognize that they If love needs truth, truth also needs love. Love and are only a threshold to a possible love in the fullest truth are inseparable. Without love, truth becomes sense. cold, impersonal and oppressive for people’s day- to-day lives. The truth we seek, the truth that gives meaning to our journey through life, enlightens us In his encyclical “Light of Faith,” Pope Francis whenever we are touched by love. One who loves offers his view on this topic by affirming an realizes that love is an experience of truth, that it essential relationship between love and truth: The opens our eyes to see reality in a new way, in union explanation of the connection between faith and with the beloved. In this sense, Saint Gregory the certainty put forward by the philosopher Ludwig Great could write that "amor ipse notitia est", love Wittgenstein is well known. For Wittgenstein, is itself a kind of knowledge possessed of its own believing can be compared to the experience of logic . . . Once we discover the full light of Christ’s falling in love: it is something subjective which love, we realize that each of the loves in our own lives had always contained a ray of that light, and cannot be proposed as a truth valid for we understand its ultimate destination. That fact everyone. Indeed, most people nowadays would not that our human loves contain that ray of light also consider love as related in any way to truth. Love is helps us to see how all love is meant to share in the seen as an experience associated with the world of complete self-gift of the Son of God for our sake. In fleeting emotions, no longer with truth. this circular movement, the light of faith illumines all our human relationships, which can then be lived in union with the gentle love of Christ.