It is odd that God has chosen the name of Love.

Maybe it's only a human name that we ascribe to God. Maybe we've imposed it on God without His permission. Or Her permission. Christianity is more explicit about the name. St. John says flatly that God is love. Other religions, as the selections in this Book of Love will illustrate, say pretty much the same thing, though perhaps more cautiously. Even the saints and the mystics, who may have had more contact with God than the rest of us, claim that they encounter overwhelming love.

If God didn't like the name, He could have easily rebuked those who use it, one way or another. If one is a Christian, one has to say that St. John's naming of God is inspired, that in some fashion God and St. John conspired to call Her Love.

Odd.

All right, our efforts at naming God are pale metaphors that reveal to us a little about God, a lot less than they don't reveal. God is like human love but also unlike it. Less passionate, less forceful, less determined, less enraptured? We can hardly say that because if we do the metaphor collapses. Love in its very nature is passionate, forceful, determined, enraptured. So if the metaphor has any validity at all it must mean that God is like human love only more so, more passionate, more forceful, more determined, more enraptured.

Scary.

Persistently passionate human lovers can be very scary. However, we can cool them off in various ways. A God who is infinitely more passionate? A God whom we can't cool off? A God from whom we can't escape? Very scary indeed.

And very odd.

Love is not just hearts and flowers and St. Valentine's Day lace -- though it is that too. Love is essentially a raging torrent rushing inexorably toward union. A river tumbling irresistibly toward the ocean, the ocean sweeping up into the river mouth in its high tide. Love is usually very messy, very troublesome, very dangerous, very consuming. It is, as Father Martin Darcy S.J. wrote in his classic The Mind and Heart of Love, finally not so much the desire to possess as the desire to be possessed. God is like that?

Most odd.

We are tempted to say that God doesn't really mean that. She conspired with St. John to say she was something sweet and nice, not something turbulent and demanding and fearsome. The word doesn't mean the same thing at all when it is used of human love as when it is used as God. Certainly Love is not love, right?

Wrong! Unless you want to argue that God plays word games as well as dice.

Love emerged in humankind not as a result of our being human but as a precondition of our becoming human. In our hominid ancestors the bonding between male and female, already passionate enough, had to extend to the female's children for humanity as we know it to emerge. The bond of love produced a family and, by so doing, produced humankind. Moreover, to really bond the family together humans had to develop in such a way that the male and female were capable of sex not merely episodically (once a month, once a year) but all the time. Now that is really messy!

Did God really want to compare Himself to the hunger of man and woman for one another, a hunger which in its pervasiveness is unique among the species about which we know? A hunger which causes all kinds of trouble in the human condition? A hunger which has developed out of the bonding propensities that we share with other less passionate species? A propensity to bond rooted in the earth and in bodies? Did God want us to think that He's really like that?

If He did, that is outrageously odd. However, one learns, like Job, not to argue with God. If God wants to be Love, then that's His business. One can understand, however, why many people try to pretend that God doesn't really mean it or to pretty the name over with a sentimental veneer. The implications of the notion that there is something in the messy joy of human passion that is very like God are too disturbing to have to take seriously.

Not only, then, do we pretend that the passion between man and woman is totally different from God's passion for us, we also try to pretend that all the other varieties of love that are part of human life are totally different from sexual passion. The word obviously means three totally different things -- God, human sexual attraction, and all the other loves in our life. There is lovep1p, lovep2p, and lovep3p. The first is God, the second is sexual attraction, the third is the way we feel about our friends and relatives. All are different. They merely happen to have the same name.

Stated that baldly, our attempt to eliminate the body from our friendships and from God may seem hilarious to some. Nonetheless, it is the implied conventional wisdom of those who want to escape from the scary implications of love as passion.

In fact, we know of no other species that have as many different kinds of love as we do. Clearly all our other loves are possible only because we are a species endowed with a very unique kind of sexuality, one oriented not merely, and not even principally, toward reproduction but toward bonding. Humans can have a wide variety of loves because they have such a powerful capacity to bond. The other loves are not the same as passion between man and woman, but the ability to engage in passionate sexual bonding makes possible all the other loves. They are not watered-down versions of sexual love but rather the result of our vast, amorphous, and desperate need to bond. Close friendship is not the same as sexual love, but it's not completely different either and is possible because we are creatures who can bond.

That leaves unanswered the question of why God wants to identify herself with human bonding, why She wants to create the impression that it is in her nature to bond with us. We often wish God would go away with that metaphor, but clearly there is no escaping it though we pretend to try.

Perhaps that is the reason that in so many of the current spate of books about virtues (Books of Virtue, etc.) love is absent. In these books one encounters much about various stoic virtues as honesty, reliability, industry, and suchlike -- all doubtless admirable virtues. However, one reads nothing in these inestimable anthologies about love.

One wonders why. Did St. Paul not say the greatest virtue was love? Have the anthologists dismissed him because love has somehow come to be identified with nineteen sixties' hedonism (as in "make love not war"), drugs, and rock music? Might it be that love is perceived as a soft, mushy, self-indulgent, undisciplined quality that hardly deserves the name of a virtue? How could one who writes editorials for the Wall Street Journal and cries for more outrage from Americans possibly sing the praises of something like love, for which there is, anyhow, little room in a free market economy? Why, of all things, should parents want to put in the hands of their children a book about love? Given the very conservative orientation of the anthologists, that may well be the case. Too bad for St. Paul. And for St. John too.

If love is a torrential force toward a union that bonds, it will bring sustained happiness only when it is focused, disciplined, intent, experienced, mature, patient, kind, and all those other nice things St. Paul says about it. The ability to love wisely and well is the most important trait parents can pass on to their children. It is not, however, sentimental mush.

Thus it seemed to us that the omission of Love from those anthologies is passing strange. So we decided to prepare a book that might be a supplement or a corrective or even a challenge to such books of virtue, minimally a polite reminder from St. Paul that without love the stoic virtues are sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

Therefore we commit this book to two fundamental propositions:

God is Love.

The greatest of all virtues is love.