187/365 That reading from Corinthians

You know the one. The one at all the weddings (but not mine--we had a reading from the letter of James). The one with the list of what love is. Love is patient, kind, enduring, and so forth. The greatest of these is love.

I used to hear it and think how sweet it was. How it belonged on a 1970s era poster with children with big eyes and round bellies holding daisies in front of them, surrounded by puffy little kittens.

I didn't get it.

It wasn't until after I was teaching that I read about this passage, and then learned about it in an overview class I took in order to teach religion in the Catholic schools--you'd think a minor plus some in theology would have been enough, but I needed to take two more classes to be legit. One of them was about the grueling topic of presenting human sexuality to middle schoolers. In the end that turned out to be a pretty amusing thing to teach, but learning about it was akin to kneeling on gravel.

The other class went through the virtues and the sins against said virtues. Faith, hope, love, temperance, etc. And he brought up this reading in regards to the virtues. The greatest of these is love, he said, because it is the one that does not fail, does not pass away. The whole point about seeing indistinctly, but there we will see face to face? That has to do with faith. Once we are one with God, faith passes away. We don't need it anymore. It has been fulfilled. And hope, not the mundane idea of hope, like "I hope Maeve has a good time today," but the hope of eternal life, the hope of one day being with God forever, well, it is fulfilled too. It passes away.

Love remains. And therefore, of these three virtues, it is the greatest.

Once it was explained to me that way, once the words had real meaning, it made so much more sense and got to me for the first time. Now, anytime I hear it read at weddings I just find myself taking a deep breath and really letting the words sink in.

And I don't care if it's a wedding reading. That second part? I want that at my funeral.