17th Sunday after Pentecost 19.9.10 Love God and Neighbour
The greatest command is to love God and the second to love neighbour as ourselves.
All other commandments and laws come under the umbrella of these two.
What does it mean to love God? It can be difficult to know quite how we relate to God. He is so much greater than us, and so much out of our normal range of knowledge and feeling. Our relationship with Him can seem very vague.
How love what or whom we do not understand?
We can come by two roads: the high and the low.
The low road is simply to obey Him. Our Lord said once: if you love Me you will keep My commands. If we keep His commands it proves at least that we are trying to please Him and that is some kind of love. So we do that. Day by day, piece by piece... just do the next thing right. Seek to please Him. Not expecting to understand everything all at once, but just to obey Him.
The high road is to be in communion with Him, through prayer, sacrament, in some cases mystical union. Like being immersed in the sea of His love. Lost in Him. Opening ourselves to the infinite reality of God, and always seeking more of Him, never being able to exhaust His fullness. Yielding to Him; complete submission, complete union.
We can employ both these approaches. We can be hard-headed and practical; doing what is there to be done.
As to the path of union, most of us are not very mystical but then we have the liturgy to lift us up to higher places, even if we don’t have much imagination. Just to be here at Mass is to enter the depths of God.
We need both approaches: we cannot be just doing tasks. God wants us to know Him, as much as we are able. He wants us to be friends not servants.
Then again we cannot ignore duties in the pursuit of high spiritual experiences.
Taking the high road and the low road: We see Him in the small and the big things; from the circumstances of every day to the overall cosmic view of His plans.
We come to value Him more. He is not just a vague presence out there somewhere, but our most valuable possession by far.
And the Neighbour? We love what God loves, if we love Him at all. The strongest argument for loving neighbour is that God loves that very same person, and we would have a hard time explaining to God why we disagree with Him.
Of course we can list off the faults of another person but so can God. The ‘love’ we are required to exercise is not the romantic emotional love, such as being ‘in love’ signifies. Our love of neighbour can also be divided into a matter of duty in individual details and a little of the mystical as well.
The mystical side: Our neighbours, being human, are spiritual beings and therefore mysterious to us. We must respect this dimension and leave it to God to work His wonders in the other person’s soul.
Our main task is not to interfere. We pray for others to receive whatever God wants to give them, and we must not resent if He is generous to them.
God is a lavish giver and we must not allow any pettiness to curtail our goodwill towards others.
And as to duty, loving the other is simply doing whatever the situation requires, as in the case of loving God.
These commands are high enough to inspire us and low enough for us to be able to reach. What God commands He also enables. With His help we do as He commands.
No comments:
Post a Comment