Love Conquers All

The phrase “Amor Vincit Omnia” (Love Conquers All) appears for the first time in the writings of the ancient Roman poet, Virgil, author of the Roman classic, The Aeneid. In Virgil, though, the phrase has a more worldly, that is, a more carnal meaning. St. Augustine would give that simple, three word phrase, an entirely different perspective, a perspective that came to him as the result of a long, deeply difficult period of internal and external struggle.

A brilliant man, he spent his early years experimenting intellectually and physically trying to find and experience something like a pure and perfect love. For much of that time he searched for it in all the wrong places. He sought it in the various human philosophies of his times, and he sought it just as often in the more base ways of the flesh. He would have a mistress for many years and would father a child. But none of these efforts satisfied his restless soul.

Augustine’s world looked a lot like our own. It was a sensually hyper-charged, materialistic and divided age that was existentially threatened by war, invading hordes of barbarians, and the decadence of a culture nearing its end. But in one seemingly simple moment in a garden in Milan, he heard a child’s voice chanting “Take, read”. He went into the house, found and took up a copy of the New Testament. It fell open to one of the Letters of St. Paul, and there he found what he had been so earnestly searching for all along.

In reading Paul’s letters, he experienced the transcendent, intimate source and goal of the love that had seemingly hidden from him for so long. He found the “love that conquers all”, and could finally say from the center of his own being, “Late I have loved you, beauty so old and so new, late I loved you.” It was then that he came to know the truth he had so intensely desired. And he was moved to write: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” He had come to know the God whom the Apostle John tells us is Love itself (1 John 4:8).

We who have come to know, to any degree, that God is truly the love our hearts desire, are now challenged to translate that love into the ways that we live our lives. We are called to be that kind of love for one another; to love all others, without exception, as Jesus loved us. I recently read a beautiful, very simple poem by Danusha Lameris that suggests, in a beautiful, poetic way, how we might live this kind of love. With a few lines and a simple metaphor, she reveals how beautiful, little acts of love can “conquer” much pain and allow us to share in the sacrificial love of Jesus on the cross. The poem is called: “Goldfinches”. Those handsome, colorful little birds are used as a metaphor for doing this kind of “love that conquers all”. In part it goes like this:

In true Chrisian love for all, then, may we be that “small, tender beak” that can ‘lift some small measure” of another’s suffering, for the sake of love, for God, who is the very essence of Love, its source and its goal. God’s unconditional love for all of us conquered sin and death, once and for all, on the cross. We are now called by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, to keep that love alive and vigorous before the eyes of all around us through the way we live our lives. May God give us the graces to be so bold and so true to his calling. Amen.