The Servant of God, Dorothy Day, was a great witness to the church’s social teaching. Starting during the Great Depression and continuing for almost 50 years, she lived in the poorest part of New York City, caring for least of our brothers and sisters.
She cared for those who fell between the cracks of society, those people society doesn’t know what to do with — the unemployed and unemployable, the disabled in body and mind.
This kind of work takes a special kind of love. And Dorothy Day wrote a lot about love.
“Love and the desire for love,” she once wrote, “is the common ground on which we all meet. It is the eternal theme of Hollywood, it is the subject of most of the pictures shown on Broadway and 42nd Street, taking it in its least common denominator. It is so urgent a need of the human heart.”
This is as true today as it was when she wrote those words. If we think about it, love and the desire for love are the great theme of our movies, TV shows, and popular music. It is what so many people search the internet for. Unfortunately, as Dorothy noticed even back then, our culture often vulgarizes love, reducing it to just physical attraction and lust.
But that doesn’t change the truth. The human heart is made for love. We long to be loved and we long to give our love to others.
But love and the desire for love is ultimately born of God. “O Lord … you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee.” Many people do not realize the truth of those beautiful words by St. Augustine. And much of the sadness and sin in the world is caused by people looking for love in the wrong places — looking for love apart from God.
But the good news is that we don’t have to turn our lives upside down in a desperate search for love. Love is closer to us than the air we breathe or the beating of our hearts.
God has given us each the great gift of his love. He has shown us that he is love. In Jesus, the love of God became flesh. In Jesus, God in his love came among us as a man — to seek out the lost, to teach us to love, to show us that he himself is love. (1 Jn 4:16)
Jesus showed us that true love is not found in selfish desires, but in acts of self-giving. True love is the gift of ourselves. It means loving like Jesus loved, with a love that goes outside ourselves. A love that is willing to die for another.
More than the example of love, God has given us the grace to love. This is what we mean by the theological virtue of charity which, along with faith and hope, is infused in us at baptism. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit,” St. Paul teaches. (Rom 5:5)
Love is the greatest of virtues, Paul says in his beautiful ode to faith, hope and charity. (1 Cor. 13) It is the greatest because love fulfills the great command that Jesus gave us: “Love one another as I have loved you.” (Jn 15:9)
The virtue of charity enables us to love God and to our neighbor with a pure love, a love that is an imitation of the love of Jesus.
We could not love with such great love if we did not have God’s help. And that is why, in his mercy, he gives us the theological virtue of charity. With this gift we can love with the love of the saints.
Faith, hope and love are great gifts our Father gives us so that we can know him and love him and serve him.
As Pope Benedict XVI said in his first encyclical, God is Love (no. 39): “Faith, hope and charity go together. … Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! It thus transforms our impatience and our doubts into the sure hope that God holds the world in his hands. … Faith, which sees the love of God revealed in the pierced heart of Jesus on the cross, gives rise to love. Love is the light — and in the end, the only light — that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working.”