I have all my young friends in the $25 seats I was talking in Upstate New York on one occasion and I went into the barber shop in the afternoon of the lecture the barber did not recognize me he said are you going going to that lecture tonight by Bishop Sheen I said yes he said do you have a ticket said no I don't well he said all the tickets have been sold you probably will have to stand I said you know it's a peculiar thing that every time I go to hear that man talk I
always have to stand I overheard a conversation on the plane the other day two women in front of me and one woman said to the other Oh What a Beautiful Diamond you have Mrs plotnik yes Mrs platnik said it's a 40 karat diamond I'd love to have a diamond like that no said Mrs plotnik it's like the hope Diamond it has a curse on it what's the curse Mr plotnik in a certain Parish a couple had taken a lottery ticket and they won the husband however was getting along in years and was suffering from heart
trouble and the wife was afraid that if she told her husband that he had won $50,000 that he would really die of heart trouble so she went to the pastor and she said father I wish you would break the news to him in such a way that it would not kill him so the pastor spoke about many odd things and finally he said to the man suppose you won $50,000 in a lottery what would you do with it oh he said I give it to you father then the priest dropped dead here's a story for
the little children there's a restaurant in New York that promises to give $1,000 to anyone who can order something they do not have in the restaurant this man went in and ordered an elephant ear on raisin bread the waiter said do you want an Indian elephant ear or an African elephant ear or he said I don't care as long as it's an elephant ear on raisin bread the waiter came back with $1,000 he said you didn't have the elephant ear oh yes we had that but we didn't have the raisin bread there perhaps is no
word more often used in our language than the word love and today it is so often stated anything is all right provided you love now let me tell you that is not true because love is not quite that simple unfortunately we have only one word in the English language for love and think of the ways we have to use it I love the New York Mets I love pickles I love chickens I love God see how confusing it is the Greeks had three different words for love and I'm going to give you those three Greek
words tonight I asked man senior before I came out how many in his parish and in this area did he think had forgotten their classical Greek he said not over 12 so if the rest of you will excuse I will interpret for that those 12 the meaning of the three Greek words the first Greek word for love is Aeros e r oos Aeros it simply means friendship human love AOS was that little Greek god that used to shoot arrows into the Earth to make the Earth fertile Aeros was not something that that pushed us toward
an object it was something that pulled us it was attractive for example example the love of a person the love of art the love of philosophy the love of the good life all that was Eros to give you an example of that love here is the engagement of GK Chesterton if there are any unmarried men in this audience who have not yet proposed and who intend to I would suggest that they take this down in shorthand and all of you married women will regret that your proposal was not in this language Chesterton wrote to his
future wife or spoke to her and said there are four great lamps of Thanksgiving burning before me the first that I was born out of the same Earth as you two I have tried to love everything in the universe as a remote preparation for loving you three I have never run after strange women you cannot understand how much this prepares a man for true love for my life ends here it has led me to you that is AOS I once asked a husband what he would like to be if he could come back to this
Earth 2 years after he died and he said my wife's second husband and that is AOS and I once heard a man pay a toast to his wife at table you have to wait until the end of this or it's a kind of a shocking toast he raised his glass and said here's to a face that would stop a clock and bid all time stand still to contemplate her beauty that's AOS then came Freud Freud changed AOS into the erotic then Aros meant sexy and this come became then the modern understanding of love the Greeks
never intended that that kind of love should so degenerate and the new erotic Love Takes the Fig Leaf it once used to be put in Greek sculpture over the secret parts of man and woman and it puts it over the face so that the person is not loved but only the experience you drink the water you forget the glass and this is Modern Love Aeros erotic rather now we come to the second Greek word for love and you all know it everyone it is filia p h i l i a you know philia because you
know Philadelphia ad delos in Greek is brother and filia love and hence Philadelphia is the City of Brotherly Love philanthropic filia love anthropos man love of humanity filia is not a love of person for person filia is a love for all Humanity regardless of race Creed color simply because people are made to the image and likeness of God that is filia now you say but I can't like everyone that's true because liking is in the emotions in the feelings but we can love everyone because Love is in the will and it can be commanded hence
our bless blessed lord said a new commandment I give you that you love one another you understand the difference now between liking and loving I can make it a little clearer this way I don't like chicken man your had chicken for dinner one day now why don't I like I why don't I like chicken well because when I was a boy my father used to send me out to a farm that he owned about 30 mil outside of the city and the Tenant farmer in order to get in good with the sheen kids gave us
Chicken in those days every day except Friday so that in the course of my my young life I rang the necks of 48,3 110 hens at night I don't have nightmares I have night hens I have visions of headless chicks squirming in Barnyard dust so I don't like chicken but if you invited me to dinner and you had only chicken and you would have been very embarrassed if I didn't eat I would eat the chicken I would love it because I could command myself to eat it that's the difference between liking and loving we may
not be able to like everyone but we can love them we can get above our emotional attitudes there was a a novelist in Russia at the close of the last century by the name of dovi who gave us an interesting story about this kind of love it seems as if an angel went down to Hell and asked an old woman in hell have you ever in your life done a good deed for anyone she say yes once I gave a carrot to a beggar very well said the angel I am going to let down a
carrot into hell and you get hold of it and I will pull you out the angel let down that carrot and the old lady grabbed hold of it and the angel began pulling out the old lady and of course thousands of people grabbed the hold of the old lady to get out of hell Jesus get off this is for me and then they all fell back into hell because there was no love of fellow man I once asked the missionary in the Pacific Island what was the greatest virtue of the people well he said I
can tell you the greatest virtue in terms of the greatest Vice it is the sin of Kaio the sin of eating alone they would go without food for 3 or 4 days until they found someone to share it that is filia an East Indian by the name of sing a Christian wanted to go into Tibet to evangelize he needed a guide to take him over the Himalaya Mountains and then gone up a short distance and they were cold and tired and they sat down on the snow and sing said to the Tibetan guide I think
I hear someone moaning down there in the crevice the Tibetan guide said don't be silly we're almost dead ourselves but Singh found a man in the creace crevis pulled him out took him to the Village beneath and was refreshed by that act of charity came back and found that the Tibetan guide was where he left him frozen to death he had not warmed himself by an act of Charity this is a supreme Act of philanthropy I told you about this friend of mine who was 14 years in the communist prison and he was so much
beaten by the Communists that he developed lung trouble in tuberculosis and was considered at one time the sickest man in the prison a new prisoner was brought in who hid in his heel a lump of sugar he took the lump of sugar out out of the heel in prison and said to the other prisoners who needs this most and they said give it to Richard worm brand it was given to my friend and he said I immediately thought of others who needed that Sugar I hadn't seen sugar in six years but I put the sugar
on the bed next to me two years later that Sugar had gone the round of all of the prisoners and came back again to his bed and then he started it on another round imagine all of these victims of the Communist persecution in their adversity being so devoted one to another about 8 years ago I was on a plane going from New York to Chicago and as the plane took off the stewardess sat down alongside of me she was a ravishingly beautiful girl celibacy doesn't blind us you know I can look at the menu without
ordering she said do you remember me I said no I don't I ought to but I don't well she said two years ago on this plane I sat with you for 20 minutes and I remember every word you said what did I say well you began by saying you were are a very beautiful girl did you know that of all the gifts that God gives the one that he gets back last and least of all is the gift of beauty he gives money and owners use it for the poor gives the gift of Song and
people sing for his glory but too often when God gives Beauty he gets back nothing but a pile of old bones so in as much as you are so exceptionally inded why don't you give your beauty to people who have never seen anything beautiful that's what you said well I said that sounds just exactly like me that's what I would say she said I've had two years to think it over and now I'm ready to do anything when now all right come to my office and I will tell you where you were going she said
tell me now I'm ready to go all right you're going to a leper colony in Vietnam so I sent her to a leper colony in Vietnam she has a little Jeep drives around the Villages and searches particularly under bridges because when lepers are driven out of villages they hide under the bridges then she takes them to a leprosarium and with a doctor cares for these people and in one of her letters she said I do not know whether they ever think that they are looking at anything beautiful but I know that I am the Gratitude
of these good people this is filia the second kind of love now we come to the third I was just looking at my watch to see how long I've been talking I've been talking about over 20 minutes and you know it's amazing isn't it the way they stay awake huh I don't understand it I know if I were down there listening to me I would go to sleep there was an Irish family my dear young people who moved from du to Boston and one of the sons moved to Chicago the father died in Boston and
the son in Chicago wired his brother in Boston and said what were father's last words and the telegram came back father had no last words mother was with him to the end so you probably wonder whether father has last words now we're coming to the third Greek word and there's no English equivalent for this so you have to learn the word a g a p e Agape or Agape as it is sometimes pronounced AG g a p it was used before Christ but never with any fixed meaning but when a new love came to this
earth the love of God for man the word AOS would not do the word filia would not do so the Holy Spirit inspired the new Testament writers to seek about for some other word that would Express this abounding boundless love of God for man and they hit upon the word agine agapy in the verb form and it is used 250 times in the New Testament the reading that you heard tonight from John if you went into the original Greek you would find that that word was agape love pick up the 13th chapter of St Paul's
first letter to the Corinthians the whole 13th chapter is on love it's the most beautiful passage on love in the world and the Greek word is the one I gave you you you see we had to have a new word the world had never thought of sacrificial love it's easy to love those who love you as our lord said but to love when you're unloved that's heroic God loves me now I am not particularly lovable and God loves you now maybe two or three of you will admit too that you're not particularly lovable either but
God loves you anyway why does he love you why does he love me he puts his love into us that's why therefore we become lovable as a mother for example will put her love into a child regardless of what that child is whether useful or not so God puts his love into us to give you an example of what this love is like because it's so unearthy suppose a lifeguard at a beach is asked if there was a very beautiful girl drowning out there on the surf would you risk your life to save her he
very lik would say yes I would I would particularly if she's very beautiful I would risk my life well suppose there's a person out there dying in the surf who did you and your family a lot of harm would you rescue that person he would think about it now that's the way God loved us when we were unlovable when we were his enemies he loved us suppose this were a courtroom a judge is here Seated on the bench before him is his own son who committed murder there is no doubt whatever of the son's guilt
he had murdered a boy the father is bound to execute Justice and he condemns his son to death immediately after rendering the sentence he steps down from the bench and says to his son I will die for you that would be Mercy he would be just when he was sentencing him to death merciful when he took his place that is what God does for us but that is not the total picture suppose at the moment that the son was condemned to death that the boy who had been murdered walked in alive the son would say
you say that I killed this boy you sentence me to death there's no murder see he's alive I demand to be free and so we can say we have been guilty of the death of Christ we nailed him to that cross as I look at him I see there my own life my autobiography has been written the pen the nails the blood the ink his skin the parchment I'm guilty of that death and on Easter Sunday morning when he rises from the dead I can say see he's alive I'm free that's the meaning of Agape
of love now come back to what I said at the beginning is it true now that anything is all right provided you love no what kind of love AOS erotic filia agape and this is the love to which we are committed not just a Sentimental love but the love for the unlovable for those who are anti love it is interesting I don't know should no should I go into this or not the story of St Peter well I was going to conclude but I will go into this love scene I was at the spot myself
as a matter of fact you have a picture of it I was at the Sea of Galilee where there are two great rocks the Sunday after Easter our blessed Lord appeared at at that spot because the Gospel of John tells us that our Lord came to the shore where there was a fire and Bread near the fire seven men were fishing in the boat our lord said to them have you caught anything now remember this is the Sunday after the resurrection keep that in mind the Sunday after the resurrection they could dimly perceive in the
morning Mists to figure and John said it's the Lord the Risen Lord and Peter was there and he he'd been naked in the boat and he puts something around him plunges into the sea and swims 100 yards to get to our Lord but then as we read this story we find that Peter is back in the boat in a little while dragging in the net with 153 fishes why if our Peter was so anxious to see our Lord that he plunged into the sea why did he go back to the boat because of that fire
those tongues of fire were eloquent tongues they were reminders of a fire of 10 nights before when three girls one after another came up to Peter and said to him have you been with a master he said I don't even know man and they reminded him of the night he denied our blessed Lord and he couldn't stand the fire those Flames were like the fire of hell and he plunged again into the deep then when he came back the Lord asks him three times do you love me now listen carefully there were two in the
original gospel two Greek words that were used in the conversation one word was filine filia the other was Agape I'm going to translate filia by natural human love I'm going to translate Agape by a totally Divine sacrificial committed love the conversation is as follows Simon son of John do you love me with the Divine totally committed sacrificial kind of love and Peter who had denied our Lord three times was not going out on any more Limbs and he said Lord you know that I love you in a natural human friendly kind of way second time
Simon son of John do you love me with a Divine totally committed sacrificial love and Peter said Lord you know all things you know that I love you in a human natural friendly kind of way the third time our lord said Simon son of John do you love me in a natural human friendly kind of way and Peter was sad because the Lord seemed to doubt the other but the Lord reached down and took the little love that he had and told him to feed his lambs and feed his sheep and this is the beautiful
story of the two meanings of love as they are in the gospel and may you carry away in the meditation of this evening the kind of love to which you are committed in the gospel you will always think of that word Agape when you see it in reference to the love of our blessed Lord you know my good people we never find perfect love here never Every Woman promises a man a love that only God can give and every man promises a woman a love that only God can give we try to relive the Beautiful
Moments Of Love but they cannot be relived they cannot be recaptured why because it was not the moment it was not ourselves it was the Divine that was shooting through us there was a moment of Eternity making use of human love to remind us that our love is not the source of love all that we ever get are fractions Sparks of love that's all Sparks that have fallen from the great Hearth of love which is God when you understand this mystery then you will also grasp why your heart is not perfect in shape and Contour
like a valentine heart remember the valentine heart always perfect in shape your heart isn't that shape yours heart is not perfect there seems to be a little piece missing out of the sight of every human heart and that maybe to symbolize a piece that was torn out of the universal heart of Humanity on the cross but I think the real meaning is that when God made the heart of each and every one of you he found it so good and so fine and so lovable that he kept a small sample of it in heaven and
then he sent that heart into this world where you would try to capture all the love you could but where you could never really love with your whole heart because you haven't a whole heart to love with and you'll never be perfectly happy never be wholehearted never be really at peace until you go back again to God to recover that peace that he has been keeping for you from all eternity God love you
