Love in Any Language
(Acts 14:21-27; Rev.21:1-5; Jn.13:31-33a, 34-35)
In his novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg says that the Inuit people of Greenland have a hundred words for snow. [i]
They have words for light, wind-blown snow; drifted snow; powdery snow, crusted snow, wet snow, slushy snow and many more.
A hundred words is an exaggeration, I’m told; however, they do have dozens. Why so many? It’s because these hardy people have long relied on clear communication for their survival. The subtleties of ice and snow can mean the difference between life and death.
If such clarity is so important in Greenland, then why do we have so few words for Love in English? Surely love and human relationships with all their complexities are just as important in our society.
In English, we do have a few words for some aspects of love, like affection, fondness and tenderness, but we usually use only one word – Love – to express almost everything, like ‘I love my wife, ‘I love my dog,’ ‘I love food,’ ‘I love my father,’ and ‘I love music.’ They all mean very different things.
When there’s no word for something, it becomes quite easy to ignore it. And when our vocabulary is limited, it can be hard to clearly communicate, or even recognise, our own feelings and intentions.

Slogans like ‘Love is love’ are largely meaningless without clarification. It’s like saying that ‘food is food,’ when we know that there are important differences between various foods.
Sanskrit has 96 words for love, including Anurakti (passionate love), Anuraga (intense love for God), and Sneha (maternal love). The Sami people of Scandinavia have over 200 such words. And Greek famously has four key words: eros, philia, storgé and agape, which we sometimes borrow in English.[ii]
Eros is passionate, romantic love (Song 1:2-4). Philia is friendship or brotherly love (Heb.13:1). Storgé (Stor-jay) is family love (Rom.12:9-10). And Agape is the most profound kind of love. It’s the selfless and unconditional love that Jesus demonstrates when he feeds the hungry and heals the sick, and especially when he sacrifices himself on the Cross.
This is the love Jesus speaks of in today’s Gospel, when he tells us to love one another. It’s what St John means when he says that God is love (1Jn.4:8).
In the early 1920s, Jesus regularly appeared to a Spanish mystic, Sr Josefa Menéndez, in France. With the authorisation of Pope Pius XII, Jesus’ messages have since been published in her book, The Way of Divine Love. [iii]
On 28 November 1922, Jesus told Josefa what he means by Love:
‘I am all love!’ he said. ‘My heart is an abyss of Love.
‘It is Love that created man and all that exists in the world to serve him. It is Love that impelled the Father to give his Son for the salvation of man lost through sin.
‘It was Love that made a very pure virgin, almost a child, renounce the charms of her life in the Temple, consent to become the Mother of God, and accept all the sufferings that divine motherhood was to impose on her.
‘It was Love that compelled me to be born in the harsh, cold winter, poor and deprived of everything.
‘It was Love who hid me for thirty years in the poorest and most total obscurity and the most humble work.
It was Love that made me choose solitude and silence, to live an obscure existence and voluntarily submit to the orders of my Mother and my adoptive father. For Love could see a future vision of many souls who would follow me and take delight in conforming their lives to mine.
‘It was Love that made me embrace all the miseries of human nature. For the Love of my heart saw even further. It knew how many souls in great danger, helped by the actions and sacrifices of many others, would find life again.

‘It was Love that made me suffer the most shameful mockeries and the most horrible torments… to shed all my Blood and to die on the cross to save man and redeem the human race.
‘And Love also saw in the future, all the souls who would unite their sufferings and actions, even the most ordinary ones, to my sufferings and blood, to give me a great number of souls!’
Just as every snowflake is different, so there’s a world of difference between one kind of love and another. God’s extraordinary self-sacrificial love simply cannot be equated with anyone’s love for ice-cream.
So, when you say you love someone, what does that mean?
And if you say that you love God, what do you really mean?
[i] Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Picador Modern Classics, New York, 2011
[ii] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves. HarperCollins Religious, London, 2012.
[iii] Sr Josefa Menendez, The Way of Divine Love, Must Have Books, 2023.