'love. Love. LOVE'

Teilhard de Chardin — the Jesuit priest and paleontologist who spent his life trying to reconcile evolutionary science with mystical faith — wrote: “Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world. Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.” He meant it literally. He believed love was not a human emotion but a cosmic force — the same force that draws atoms into molecules, molecules into cells, cells into organisms. Without it, nothing holds.

Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13 that without love, everything else — prophecy, knowledge, mountain-moving faith, even martyrdom — amounts to nothing. Nothing. He didn’t say love was the best thing. He said it was the only thing that gave anything else its meaning. Everything else, without love, is noise.

Love. Love. Love. Three times because once is a statement. Twice is emphasis. Three times is a practice, a discipline, a way of being in the world that must be chosen again every single day, even when — especially when — it is difficult.

This is for the woman who has chosen love as a discipline, not a feeling — who loves on purpose, every day, regardless of what the day brings back.