LEARNING HOW TO LOVE
In the 2007 movie Evan Almighty, Evan Baxter’s family walks out on him, upset that he’s determined to build the ark that God supposedly told him to build. While at a diner, they watch as the patrons jeer at Evan on TV. Joan, Evan’s wife, listlessly asks a waiter for a refill. She doesn’t know it but it’s God in character. She asks him what someone does with a situation like this.
He sits, and tells her this:
‘Sounds like an opportunity. Let me ask you something.
If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience?
Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient?
If they pray for courage, does God give them courage, or does he give them opportunities to be courageous?
If someone prayed for their family to be closer, you think God zaps them with warm, fuzzy feelings?
Or does he give them opportunities to love each other?’
God is love. But – loving is hard.
We’re faced with two big questions this Sunday as we’re given the Great Commandment (Mark 12:30-31, Matt 22:37-39): how exactly do we love God, and how exactly do we love our neighbour as ourselves?
Evan Baxter had a mission from God. He tried turning it down, but God wouldn’t have it. God wanted Evan to be the one to send a message to the world. The same way He wanted the Israelites to send His Word into the world.
Evan had to dress the way God wanted him to – watch the movie: the sight of a modern-day politician in ancient-time robes will have you sniggering – eat what He wanted him to, and stand up for Him despite the outright disbelief and mockery. Same with the Israelites: God, through Moses, told them exactly how to live every day. He had good reason. God had to teach them how to live as His children at a time when they were beset left, right and centre with paganism, polytheism and false ideologies. It made sense for Him to lay down clear commands that taught them exactly how and what to do as His people. This was especially important when they finally entered the land of Canaan. Israel’s fate rested on their obedience to this one great commandment. If they obeyed the commandment, they would have long, blessed lives. If they didn’t, they could expect to be cursed by God. We see this in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
They prayed a particular prayer every day, acknowledging their one true God and His desire that they love Him with all their being. Jesus, Himself a Jew, was familiar with the Shema and tells the scribe that loving God ‘with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength’ was the first, but not the end. “The second,” Jesus says, “is this: you must love your neighbour as yourself.” (Mk 12:31).
So now, the first of the two big questions: how exactly do we love God? Interestingly, Jesus adds another faculty to the ones Moses had spelt out. Jesus says, love God with all your ‘mind’.
Why?
Loving someone involves getting to know them thoroughly and keeping in mind what they mean to you. It’s what keeps us going when loving them becomes hard. More than 1,000 years after Moses, Jesus was surrounded by His people who were still struggling with sin and desperation. They were keeping all 613 commandments of the Torah but they’d been waiting for the promised Messiah for generations. They needed to remember who God was to them, what He’d done for them, and how to love Him when life was so hard.
Do we keep God at the forefront of our minds and get to know Him a little more each day? Do we mediate on His Word and find Him there? How else do we fall in love with Him, and stay in love with Him, especially when life gets hard?
Knowing God, loving God, comes from spending time with Him, like we do with anyone we love. But beyond time at Mass, time spent adoring the Blessed Sacrament, time spent in ministry, in our religious obligations, we need time with His Holy Word. We need to learn who our God of the Gospel is so we can love Him deeply, truly. Blessed is the man, the psalmist says, ‘for whom the law of the LORD is his joy; and on his law he meditates day and night.’ (Ps 1:2). It’s what the Shema asks the Jews to do. It’s what Jesus says we must do, when He answers the scribe.
Because when we love someone deeply, truly, doing anything for them becomes possible, and the things we wouldn’t do for ourselves, we’d do for them.
And God knows this.
When we remember who is He to us, when we keep Him in the forefront of our thoughts every day, we do for Him what we might be reluctant to do on our own account. Like putting time and effort into our parents, a spouse, our kids, siblings, the rest of our relatives, that difficult colleague, that infuriating friend, the people in church, around our neighbourhood, on the train or bus… When we’re tired and stressed and want a minute or sixty away from everyone. When we have to grit our teeth and smile as we give our time and energy to someone. Day in, day out.
So the second big question: how exactly do we love our neighbour as ourselves?
Actually, a more interesting question would be which comes first: loving God, or loving neighbour? Do we have to love God in order to love our neighbour, or do we love our neighbour so that we can love God?
It’s all one, though, isn’t it?
In Moses’ time, it seems like it must have been easier than now to love God directly. After all, He was right there with them. They had His presence, His voice. It’s harder to love someone who isn’t physically around us. But then again, we, too, have the tabernacle, the Blessed Sacrament available 24/7. We have not only our priests, but our eternal, ever-mediating High Priest ‘holy, innocent and uncontaminated…raised up above the heavens’ (Heb 7:26).
We have the same High Priest present in one another, especially in the poor, the suffering, those in need, those in sin. Jesus was comfortable with all of them. He looked at them and saw their value, their dignity, when most others couldn’t. Loving our neighbour isn’t about feeling – it’s about doing. It’s not the warm, fuzzy feelings but the concrete action, day in, day out, of serving Jesus in someone else.
Take this example: Meg Matenaer, contributor to CatholicMom.com, was highly stressed taking care of her young kids and facing sleepless nights of frustration, guilt, weariness. She wanted to be holy, and to spend more time in prayer and with God. But it was impossible. She felt like a terrible mum. One night, she opened the book Where There is Love, There is God – a collection of quotes from Mother Teresa, edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk. In it, Mother Teresa explains the meaning of the distressing disguise of Jesus in the poor.
“Jesus chooses as His disguise the miseries and poverty of our people in the slums,” she says, “You cannot have the vow of charity if you have not got the faith to see Jesus in the people we contact. Otherwise, our work is no more than social work…we do it for Somebody.”
She told her nuns they should be grateful for the plentiful opportunities to work with the poor, saying, “…we have received much more from them because they have given us an opportunity to be twenty-four hours with Jesus, for whatever we do to them, to the little ones, we do it to Jesus. He has said so, it must be so.”
Meg realised with joy that her little kids weren’t getting in the way of her desire to be holy, or her prayer time. They were her prayer time. She realised that in her children, Jesus was surrounding her all day long, allowing her to tend to His needs. She says, “I, too, get to be Mother Teresa because God’s given me my very own slum where I can spend the day looking for people--Him--to pick up, clean up, and love.”
That delighted her, and she went to bed, eager for the next day to begin, so she could ‘kiss the sweet head of Jesus in my little ones’. She says joyfully, “What blessed work I’d been given!”
It’s not about the feeling but the doing. In the face of doubt, embarrassment, fear, we persevere like Evan Baxter. With dogged determination and bone-weariness, often shouting into the void at God in anger, frustration, or tears, we bruise our pride and wrestle with ourselves as we try to help and give and support, without the desire or expectation of reward, gratitude, or even acceptance. We don’t do it for the feelings. We do it because beneath that distressing disguise is Jesus. And that’s reason enough to love.
Evan finds that out at the end of the movie:
God character : You did good, son. You changed the world.
Evan : No, no, I didn't.
God character : Well, let's see. Spending time with your family, making them very happy. Gave that dog a home.
Evan : Right. So?
God character : So? How do we change the world?
The God character picks up a stick and writes in the earth: A-R-K.
God character : One act of random kindness at a time.
Loving God finds its expression in loving our neighbour. And loving our neighbour fills us with love for God. If we can learn to love Jesus in His most distressing disguise, we’re living in love with Him and He’s sharing our lives, even when it’s hard and miserable. And we’re helping Him change the world.
That’s what true love can do.
May this week ahead find you actively participating in your love story with God, changing yourself and changing the world around you with little acts of kindness and a heart full of joy!
Article by Joyce Norma, HFC Blog Contributor