A Google search tells us that, “Love is an intense, deep affection for another person” and can also mean, “liking something a lot.” With this understanding we can say that we love our spouse, our children or our friends but also the color green, pizza and the latest hit song. What results is a diminishment of the meaning of the word love — and this has significant implications. If it is possible to “love” anything and everything, it becomes difficult to recognize the true meaning of love and the significance it has for our lives.

If we reflect on our experience, we may find that we often tire quickly of what we thought we loved or, more seriously, of whom we thought we loved. This can wreak havoc in our relationships with other people and our friendship with God.

To keep our spiritual balance, it is important to understand the true meaning of love and who it is that we are meant to love. When Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment, he replied that the greatest commandment is love, specifically love of God above all things and love of our neighbor as ourselves. It is significant that both of these commands instruct us to focus our love in ordered fashion, in other words to keep things in balance; God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves.

While we may struggle with the commandment to love God above all things, our struggle is rarely because we don’t understand what that means. But understanding what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves can be difficult, particularly when we are surrounded by messages encouraging us to think of ourselves as ‘’Number One.’’ This sort of mathematical notion automatically puts everyone else into at least second place.

We can find a much healthier perspective in St. Thomas Aquinas. “Well ordered self-love, whereby man desires a fitting good for himself, is right and natural but it is inordinate self-love, leading to contempt of God, that Augustine reckons to be the cause of sin,” he writes. With this understanding and the awareness that we are obliged to love our neighbor as ourselves, we can make judgments that are good for us and for our relationships with all of those who are our neighbors.

Two quotes from St. Francis de Sales, named the “Doctor of Divine Love” by the Church, may be helpful.

“Examine your heart often to see if it is such toward your neighbor as you would like his to be toward you were you in his place. This is the touchstone of true reason.”

“You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working. Just so you learn to love God and many by loving. If you really want to love God, go on and love him more and more.”