What greater love could there be than to give the gift of yourself, your very life, for someone you love? No words, no romantic gestures, no gifts of gold could compare. Life is precious, and giving your life for another is equally as precious. St. Thomas Aquinas said that “To love is to will the good of the other.” Christ gave his life for us in the ultimate act of self-giving love. We are called to imitate Christ in his gift of salvific love. God created our hearts to be oriented to loving in this way, for we are most fulfilled when we lovingly give ourselves to others. St. Paul VI wrote: “man…cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes 24). We imitate Christ when we offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, living by what St. John Paul the Great called the “law of the gift.” He said, “We become most truly human in the measure in which we go out of ourselves and give ourselves for the sake of others…” What a paradox: to find life, one must give it up as a sacrifice. We find the true meaning and joy in our lives precisely to the degree that we give our lives away to God and others. This is Jesus’s command to us as his disciples: to love one another.
The law of the gift
