The power of saying ‘I love you.’

Sometimes I get a card that says ‘I love you.’ It is always a shock when someone writes or says those most special words. Sometimes they are said between friends and relations in a most beautifully meaningful way. Whereas I never said ‘I love you’ to my father before he died, I said it repeatedly to my mother during the last precious years of our time together.

It is so important to tell people that we love them, even though we may find it very difficult to do so. Some find it embarrassing. Others were told it might lead them into trouble. Men may feel it is wimpish. Whatever the reason, we often leave it too late. Someone close to us dies and, for a long time, we regret not having assured them of our love. Will we ever forget the desperate mobile messages of aching intimacy from those aboard that doomed plane on 11 September?

Because we are made by God to love and to be loved, our lives will always be unfulfilled until we nourish that hunger within us. ‘If you give your heart to no one,’ wrote C. S. Lewis. ‘ it will become unbreakable, impenetrable and irredeemable.’ Our hearts are made to be given away. Like the heart of Jesus, they are sacred in their human loving. ‘The love with which we love each other,’ wrote St.
Augustine, ‘is the same love with which God loves us.’ The Christian Church was founded on the human friendship and love of Jesus for the women and men around him.
When we tell people we love them truly, we redeem them with God’s life. Instead of possessing them, we set them free. At our pre-marriage talks, I try to point out to couples the difference between total fusion and a certain independence in their mutual commitment. There are those who give over all their power to the partner and, with it, often their self-esteem too. It is possible to diminish oneself (and the other), by becoming too dependent. That is not true love; maybe more like addiction. Gibran puts it very well in The Prophet:

Love one another, but not make a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone,
Even as the strings of the lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadows.

I am very aware of the power of those words, ‘I love you.’ They can change our lives for ever. When said from the heart there are no more transforming moments. I think God needs us to whisper these words to each other. God is love and wherever love is, God is. And some suffering too! ‘If you dare to love, be prepared to grieve.’
Are there those who never heard such words? Or people who never said them? In spite of the tears that come with love, could this be the pearl of great price that lies hidden in one of the summer fields along your life’s path this year?
Prism of Love.