For your love is better than wine

It is a common experience that the person who is in love finds the delight of love to be similar to being intoxicated. The strong emotions of love pull us out of ourselves. We lose our preoccupations and are drawn out of our little worlds in an experience of self-forgetting. When the human experience of love is coupled by strong disorders within the person, these emotions become the source for compulsions and other forms of attachment.

However, when properly ordered, human love becomes a wellspring through which we accomplish greatness and nobility. Love becomes the energy that inspires and gives the strength to endure. How much greater is Divine love.

Human love is beautiful but often falls short of the greatness of Divine love. Divine love is unlimited, always refreshing, and a deep font from which the lover is able to discover continuous treasure. Those who have found this treasure find that all the things of this world fail in comparison. Similar to the intoxication of human love, Divine love draws us out of ourselves and unites us with the other. It is primarily this experience of self-forgetting which gives the intoxication of love its allurement.

We desire to lose ourselves in the other. Some religions propose that this being drawn out of ourselves necessarily involves an annihilation of the self. However, in Catholic thought this moment does not destroy the individual, but rather brings our identity to its fulfillment. We are made for communion with the other, and this communion is two-fold. In being united with God and neighbor, we discover the richness of what it means to be human. We fulfill our vocation, our calling, not by following limited self-interests, but rather by being opened to the other.

This journey from a self-centered world to an other-centered world is exhilarating and refreshing. When we are purified of the disorders, sins, and attachments which keep us from this communion, our hearts drink deeply of Divine love and are set on fire.