After mass one
Sunday a young man said something interesting to me. He said,
‘Father, I think that at the mass you should be talking about
loving each other and not just talking about things from the bible
which people don’t understand.’ It is an interesting point and I
agreed with him partly. A few years ago at a wedding a man said
almost the exact same thing to me. He said, ‘You should just be
telling us to be good to each other. There is no need for all these
words from St. Paul to the Corinthians, etc.’ They are both
absolutely right about the need to talk about loving each other,
because that is one of the most important things that Jesus asked us
to do, ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ ‘Love your
neighbour as yourself.’ That is how Jesus told us that people would
recognise us as Christians, by the way we love each other. But there
is another part to it which they are forgetting.
If we are to
love one another, and that is what the Lord God asks us to do, where
are we supposed to get the strength to do that? How are you
supposed to love people who drive you crazy, or who are unjust to
you, or who do you wrong, or steal from you, who have cheated you out
of money, or offended your family? Since they are in the wrong, are
we still expected to love them? Yes we are. ‘Love your enemies,
pray for those who persecute you, bless those who curse you.’ It
seems to be a lot to ask. In fact it can seem quite unrealistic. This
is where we have to go back to the bible and see what else God is
saying to us, to try and make sense of this. And Jesus says, the two
most important commandments are, first, ‘You must love the Lord
your God above everything else’ and second, ‘You must love your
neighbour as yourself.’ This may not seem very important, but this
is where the answer lies.
What God is
telling us is that if we are rooted in him, if He is at the centre
and we become more and more filled with him and with his love, then
and only then will we have the ability to love other people. We get
the strength to love people, especially those we find more difficult
to love, from the love we experience from God in the first place. The
more our relationship with him grows, the more this is possible.
Let me give
you one example. There is a woman called Sister Alvera, from Italy.
Several years ago she set up a community to help drug addicts
recover. She believed that what these people were missing more
than anything else in their lives was the love of God, and that this
was where their problem was really coming from. So she set up a
centre to help them recover, a place where they could experience the
love of God first hand from other people. They live like a religious
community. They have no TV, no radio and no newspapers. They do a lot
of physical work and they pray a lot together. The interesting thing
is that through this way of life (which is basically a monastic way
of life – prayer and work) hundreds of men and women have overcome
their drug addiction, but more importantly they have discovered
faith, discovered the love of God for them and begun to live
completely new lives. Sr. Alvera now has 36 different centres all
over the world. They are called the Cenacolo communities.
There are
hundreds of people like Sr. Alvera and not all religious either.
Mother Teresa is another extraordinary one. How do they do this kind
of work? Where do they get the strength to work with people who can
be very difficult and very ungrateful? The answer is simple. They are
completely rooted in God. Their own personal relationship with God is
where they get the strength and energy.
You might
find yourself saying, that that’s all fine for them, but I don’t have that
kind of relationship with God, I just about get to mass on Sundays.
But what God is showing us is that our ability to love one another,
to put up with and respect those we don’t like, or agree with,
comes from our relationship with him. The more we come to know God,
the more we can love the people around us, starting with our own
families, our spouse, whoever is closest to us. As we come to know
the Lord more, our ability to love others also grows. So the key is
in coming closer to God, nothing else.
How do we come
closer to God? First, through reading his words in the bible.The
Scriptures are like personal love letters to us from God. They are
written for us personally. Also, through receiving Jesus in the
Eucharist. We cannot get any closer to God than that. Also through
repentance of sin, because God asks us to do that. We are sinners and
we continually need to repent. We also deepen and live our
relationship with God through prayer, which is simply communicating
with God.
All of these
things help to bring about conversion of the heart, rediscovering
God, coming closer to him. Only then will we be able to love the
people around us and only then will our society begin to improve. If
you want the world to improve, start with yourself.
‘You
must love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul. You
must love your neighbour as yourself.’
No comments:
Post a Comment