Love

While I was on campus today I saw a poster promoting the week of Valentine's Day as "Safe Love Week" with such enlightening and instructive things as "Condom Bingo."

Somehow your society has shifted romantic love (eros) from a emotion to a thing you do. You no longer really fall in love, rather you make love. As such, love has become simply another aspect of a person, something all people will experience and therefore should be enjoyed as much as possible and, in the short term, the most effective way to 'enjoy' love is through sex.

This shift has caused the pathetic masculine statement: "if you loved me you would sleep with me," and, in many ways the equally pathetic (though better in moral ways) statement: "if you loved me you would marry me." Both these statements reveals an immaturity, specifically in the understanding of what love should be. Sex is, outside of marriage, one of the most base things man can do, and to use it as a guage if love is stupid. Does a prostitute love you because you have had sex with them?

On the other hand, the equation that love must result in marriage is a different sort of bastardization of love, forcing it toward a natrually eros-centered existence. The claim that true love must result in marriage is an attack on both the single life and the final end of life, for in heaven there will be no marriage.

This topic is very much bottomless, and I will probably review it more as Valentine's Day approaches (I choose to not call it St. Valentine's Day because the love-holiday is specifically secular).


Glorious Saint Benedict, sublime model of virtue, pure vessel of God's grace! Behold me humbly kneeling at your feet. I implore you in your loving kindness to pray for me before the throne of God.
To you I have recourse in the dangers that daily surround me.
Shield me against my selfishness and my indifference to God and to my neighbor.
Inspire me to imitate you in all things.
May your blessing be with me always, so that I may see and serve Christ in others and work for His kingdom.

Graciously obtain for me from God those favors and graces which I need so much in the trials, miseries and afflictions of life.
Your heart was always full of love, compassion and mercy toward those who were afflicted or troubled in any way. You never dismissed without consolation and assistance anyone who had recourse to you.
I therefore invoke your powerful intercession, confident in the hope that you will hear my prayers and obtain for me the special grace and favor I earnestly implore.

May we, by your intercessions, be brought more fully into the love of God. May your prayers lead us to the full understanding of the Lord's will and may you obtain for us the graces necessary to perform this will.

Help me, great Saint Benedict, to live and die as a faithful child of God, to run in the sweetness of His loving will, and to attain the eternal happiness of heaven.
Amen.