Q. What do you mean how practical is my love?
A. Just that! As one saint exclaimed, "Love is deeds, not sweet words."
But the love that is demanded of us is not comfortable-love. Christ was not comfortable on the Cross. It has to be the love that truly takes us out of ourselves, makes us forget ourselves: our plans, our tastes, our preferences, our tiredness, our irritation in order to make another person happy.
This is why Pope Francis while in the States emphasised so much the care of the marginalised, forgotten, immigrants, poor, the unborn, the sick and the aged; basically those we'd consider bothersome. Helping such people precisely puts us in the position of God where we have to go out of ourselves and help someone else without any benefit to ourselves, without any possibility of them doing us a good deed in return. "For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?"
And even if we do not have a daily chance to exercise this love with the less fortunate in society, we can exercise it with our own families and friends wherever we live and work - especially with those we find a bother: allowing them to serve first at dinner, picking the least comfortable chair for yourself in the sitting room, allowing them to speak first in the board meeting, etc. Pope Francis would summarise these ideas in 3 words that he emphasised we have to use more and more each day: "Please." "Thank you!" and "I'm sorry."
"By this will all men know that you are my disciples: by the love you have for one another."
29thSeptember 2015