Love is the union of a lover, a beloved, and of their mutual love. When we, following scripture, assert "God is love," we confess that God is a plurality in unity; God is love.
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By the time Augustine built the stairs to his reveal that God is very love itself, he had been constructing its steps from ethics rather than metaphysics. What I mean is that Augustine was not dissecting an idea pinned to a tray. This is not bloodless definition--quite the opposite. He was talking about how love draws us out. Love requires us and compels us and irresistably changes us. Love is loving; it acts. Loving makes us lovers, bone of its bone, every more able to see and be what loving requires. Our flaming hearts accept nothing less. And in the center of its unity we strain to glimpse the form itself-–the lover, what is being loved, and love–-and that is God."In a dark night, With anxious love inflamed, O, happy lot! Forth unobserved I went, My house being now at rest. \ In darkness and in safety, By the secret ladder, disguised, O, happy lot! In darkness and concealment, My house being now at rest. \ In that happy night, In secret, seen of none, Seeing nought myself, Without other light or guide Save that which in my heart was burning. \ That light guided me More surely than the noonday sun To the place where He was waiting for me, Whom I knew well, And where none appeared. \ O, guiding night; O, night more lovely than the dawn; O, night that hast united The lover with His beloved, And changed her into her love. \ On my flowery bosom, Kept whole for Him alone, There He reposed and slept; And I cherished Him, and the waving Of the cedars fanned Him. \ As His hair floated in the breeze That from the turret blew, He struck me on the neck With His gentle hand, And all sensation left me. \ I continued in oblivion lost, My head was resting on my love; Lost to all things and myself, And, amid the lilies forgotten, Threw all my cares away." (San Juan de la Cruz)The Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff called the Trinity the communion of life and love.“Solitude is hell,” he said. “No one is an island. We are surrounded by persons, things, and beings on all sides.” The loving community of the Trinity calls us “to maintain relationships of communion with all, giving and receiving.”
Only persons can be in communion. It means that one is in the presence of the other, different from the other but open in a radical mutuality. For there to be true communion there must be direct and immediate relationships: eye to eye, face to face, heart to heart. The result of mutual surrender and reciprocal communion is community. Community results from personal relationships in which each is accepted as he or she is, each opens to the other and gives the best of himself or herself.
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