We want love: to love and to be loved. But we do not particularly like being told how to love because we want also to be free in loving. We are "hard wired" to hope for these things but at the same time we are assured that there is no rational basis for hope. Despite this it is hard to deny that the hope of love and the struggle to achieve it are the hallmarks of human history.The seat of reason, and its operation in the mind, can be demonstrated through scientific examination, and its processes measured and studied. Hope, on the other hand, is more elusive. We do not know where hope comes from, and why some people seem so able to consistently live by its tenets and others seem so bereft of it that they can be said to hardly be living at all and sometimes choose not to go on doing so.
Young couples want to be free to love whom they choose as demonstrated so dramatically in the perennially favorite classic play, "Romeo and Juliet" and, tragically, sometimes do not choose well. Today people so often express their own version of love that, for the first time since records have been kept in the 1950's, less than half of all households express the committed love of man and woman through marriage, choosing concubinage or "living together" instead. The "spirit of the 60's", in which all idea of law was seen as a drag, seems to have reached its logical conclusion in this spurning of conventional covenant love through marriage.
For the full text of the homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter visit Meeting Christ in the Liturgy.
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