Harnessing the POWER of LOVE

By Sister Michelle L’Allier

Some day, after we have mastered the winds and the waves, the tides and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
--Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Easter Blessings! I give thanks that the Easter Season is 50 days long, coinciding with the emergence of spring. Here in Minnesota it’s been a tumultuous transition from winter to spring with flooding in the Red River Valley and concurrent drought where I live in the Twin Cities.

Reflecting on the beauty and challenge of nature’s rhythms, I recognize the same beauty and challenge present in human relationships as well. Chardin invites us to “harness for God the energies of love;” Jesus witnesses to this path as he lived faithfully unto death, laying down his life in love, followed by rising to new resurrected life. Those of us who follow his way as Christians continue to learn how to live on in God’s love.

Our community of Franciscan Sisters, too, has been moving through the passage of death to new life—we buried four of our Sisters last month. It was a Lenten letting go for us who had come to know, love, and share life with these wisdom women in their 90’s. Each one was ready to enter fullness of life with God, showing us the way with great grace.

Sister Loretto Schneider

, for example, influenced my professing as a Secular Franciscan after college. She served as Spiritual Assistant to our emerging fraternity of idealistic young Franciscan men and women, and encouraged me beyond my comfort zone and into unfamiliar waters. We lived the Gospel life, experimenting with how to translate Gospel values in the marketplace of everyday life. One of the ways I experienced the transformative power of love was in our fraternity’s risk to tend to the beginnings of Listening House of St. Paul, a drop-in center for men and women on the streets.

Years later, Listening House continues to flourish, and I found my way to religious life within the Franciscan family as a Franciscan Sister of Little Falls. For all of this, I give thanks to God, mindful of what Margaret J. Wheatley says about the power of love:

What gives power its charge, positive or negative, is the quality of relationships. Those who relate through coercion, or from disregard for the other person, create negative energy. Those who relate to others and who see others in their fullness create positive energy. Love in organizations, then, is the most potent source of power we have available.
Cited in Bennett Sims, Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium

As you and I learn to harness “the energies of love,” may we share this “potent source of power” bringing it to bear in our interpersonal relationships, in our organizations and in our world.

LOVE

by Sister Jean Schwieters


For some time, now, I have stared at the word, LOVE wondering what I could say about it. It is a difficult word to tackle because it has come to mean so many different things to so many different persons – pleasure, passion, affection, devotion, gratification, delight, admiration, inspiration, romance, attachment, fondness, desire, tenderness, infatuation, yearning, idolatry and even abuse. In theology we speak of it as a virtue. In relationships we honor it as a source of power. Most often we refer to it as a feeling, a feeling, I believe, that is buried deep inside us and makes itself felt in a variety of experiences. Little by little it rises to the surface and we are made to deal with it. We can deny it; we can squelch it; we can enter into its lure and allow it to grow and expand within us until it spills over and reaches into the lives of others.

As always I go to my mentor, Francis of Assisi, to see what his life tells me about it. For Francis LOVE was God. And within us, who have been created in God’s image and likeness, a spark of the Divine resides. If we allow that spark to ignite we find that it sheds light on moments of darkness; it opens doors when we feel lost and abandoned; it keeps us restless when we search for answers to perplexing questions; it pushes us into pathways of mystery where we struggle to know what appears unanswerable. But, most of all LOVE enters into every relationship we form with humans and creatures alike. It motivates us to get involved when danger threatens our lives and the life of our planet. It reshapes our lives when we have grown indifferent and comfortable with the status quo. It places unwanted questions in our psyche that won’t go away until we deal with them. It energizes us when we discover a new way of seeing the persons we are in relationship with. It gives us the courage to address issues we would rather walk away from.

Because LOVE is God, it never ends. Love is a bottomless reservoir, a never completed journey, a space within us with no dimensions. Like all of us, Francis stumbled over the obstacles he himself placed in the way. He struggled to show God’s face to those who resisted or demanded or refused to mirror back the Divine Image. However, he always insisted on love between his followers, no matter what the treatment they received. Throughout his life he surrendered to the call of LOVE. And in the end his whole person reflected the image of Love crucified. He truly became a mirror of God who is LOVE.