Real love is demanding. I would fail in my mission if I did not clearly tell you so. For it was Jesus - our Jesus himself - who said: 'You are my friends if you do what I command you'. Love demands effort and a personal commitment to the will of God. It means discipline and sacrifice, but it also means joy and human fulfilment.
Interpretation
Real love requires commitment and effort, often involving sacrifice, but ultimately leads to joy and fulfillment.
In this quote, Pope John Paul II emphasizes that genuine love is not merely an emotion but entails responsibility, discipline, and a willingness to adhere to a higher calling, in this case, the will of God. It suggests that true love involves challenges and sacrifices, yet it also brings about profound joy and fulfillment in one's life, highlighting the dual nature of love as both demanding and rewarding.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a wedding ceremony to emphasize the commitment involved in marriage.
True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.
Like so many pilgrims before us, we kneel in wonder and adoration before the ineffable mystery which. was accomplished here... In This Child - the Son who is given to us - we find rest for our souls and the true bread that never fails - the Eucharistic Bread foreshadowed even in the name of this town: Bethlehem, the house of bread. God lies hidden in the Child; divinity lies hidden in the Bread of Life
And everything else will then turn out to be unimportant and inessential except this: father, child, and love. And then, looking at the simplest things, we will all say, Could we have not learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded in everything that is?
Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.
Man matures through work which inspires him to difficult good.
United with the angels and saints of the heavenly Church, let us adore the most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist. Prostrate, we adore this great mystery that contains God's new and definitive covenant with humankind in Christ.
Love is the pursuit of the whole.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
Maybe true love isn't out there for me, but I can sublimate my loneliness with the notion that true love is out there for someone.
Was not Jesus an extremist in love? - "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you."
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.
You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore. You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days. Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God. But let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
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