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 said 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’. Then, ‘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 have
overcome their drug addiction, but more importantly they have discovered faith,
discovered the love of God for them and begun completely new lives. Sr. Alvera now has 36 different centres all
over the world. And just a few years ago
she opened one in Knock. It is called the Cenacolo community.
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.
Now you
might be saying, well 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. And also through repenting of sin,
because God asks us to do that. To say
that we don’t have any sins or that we don’t need to repent of them is to call
God a liar. We are sinners, 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.
‘You must love the Lord
your God with all your heart and soul.
You must love your neighbour as yourself.’
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