Why are we commanded to love?
“Christ did not love humanity, He never said He loved humanity; He loved men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a gigantic centipede.”)[2] Why do we need Christ and his difficult command to love? Because we are fallen. (This stance was nicely summed up by Rúben Gallo who wrote: “Human beings, regardless of gender, race, social class, or nationality, are invariably selfish, cruel, and corrupt.”[3] Gallo’s statement is the truth of the liberal-humanist motto: “All humans, independently of their sex, race, religion and wealth, share the same rights to freedom and dignity.” This fallenness is why Raffaele Nogaro, bishop emeritus of Caserta, is right to claim that Christ’s words on the cross “Father, why have you abandoned me?” are “L’affermazione del fallimento di ogni vita cosciente e responsabile” [an affirmation of the failure of every conscious and responsible life].) Are we not utopian here?
We know this. After all. We read and hear it from Jesus, over and over again. “Love one another…love your enemies…love one another as I have loved you.” And yet, until reading this piece, I’d not considered the particularity of the command. Or the inherent violence of Christ’s words. By that, I mean the distortion made by those of us who force Christianity into religious categories by correlating it with all others, like Buddhism. It isn’t difficult to proclaim a love for humanity. We hear and see that generic love expressed by humanists/activists proclaiming a vast variety of causes, ranging from climate change to population control.
Loving the person who lives next door, with her constant barking dogs, the unwashed parishioner sitting next to us on the pew or the boss who fired us, is vastly different.
Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces…. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The worldsoul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it…. All modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.[6]
I know nothing about love.
Not long after my conversion, I sat in the empty church, staring at the crucifix. The priest approached to ask if I was okay. I replied, “I know nothing about love,” with tears in my eyes. More than two decades have passed since that conversation, and I now understand “why are we commanded to love?’ at every level of my being.
Because love is what he is. ‘He must increase, I must decrease.”
I mean, of course, the love Jesus commands of us. Not the coffee I love, my husband, or my dog, but the person put in front of me. The one who cuts in front of me in line or traffic. Or the politician proclaiming evil while professing her love of Catholicism. There can be no exclusions.
My online friend Janet Klasson recently wrote a post about our baptismal anointing. It’s an anointing renewed on the second Sunday of Easter, the Feast of Divine Mercy. Janet writes:
‘The baptized have become “living stones” to be “built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood.” (2 Pet 2:5) By Baptism they share in the priesthood of Christ, in his prophetic and royal mission. They are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that [they] may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called [them] out of darkness into his marvelous light (2 Pet 2:9).” Baptism gives a share in the common priesthood of all believers.’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #1268)
Moreover, I was amazed to find in this passage the exact words I had felt the Lord speak to my heart the day before: “I have called you out of darkness into my own wonderful light.”
What does that mean?
We baptized are kings, prophets, and priests?
Really?
The Lord Jesus, the divine Teacher and Model of all perfection, preached holiness of life to each and everyone of His disciples of every condition. He Himself stands as the author and consumator of this holiness of life: “Be you therefore perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect”.(216)(2*) Indeed He sent the Holy Spirit upon all men that He might move them inwardly to love God with their whole heart and their whole soul, with all their mind and all their strength(217) and that they might love each other as Christ loves them.(218) The followers of Christ are called by God, not because of their works, but according to His own purpose and grace. They are justified in the Lord Jesus, because in the baptism of faith they truly become sons of God and sharers in the divine nature. In this way they are really made holy. Then too, by God’s gift, they must hold on to and complete in their lives this holiness they have received. They are warned by the Apostle to live “as becomes saints”,(219) and to put on “as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved a heart of mercy, kindness, humility, meekness, patience”,(220) and to possess the fruit of the Spirit in holiness.(221) Since truly we all offend in many things (222) we all need God’s mercies continually and we all must daily pray: “Forgive us our debts”(223)(3*)
But how do we do this?
We who sin with almost every thought?
And whose faith flickers with the merest breeze?
We grasp for Jesus, accept our poverty and our nothingness, and have confidence, not in ourselves but in Jesus, who waits for us to ask and beg for mercy.
“C’est la confiance et rien que la confiance qui doit nous conduire à l’Amour”….
C’est la Confiance
“It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love”. The specific contribution that Therese offers us as a saint and a Doctor of the Church is not analytical, along the lines, for example, of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Her contribution is more synthetic, for her genius consists in leading us to what is central, essential and indispensable. By her words and her personal experience she shows that, while it is true that all the Church’s teachings and rules have their importance, their value, their clarity, some are more urgent and more foundational for the Christian life. That is where Therese directed her eyes and her heart.
50. As theologians, moralists and spiritual writers, as pastors and as believers, wherever we find ourselves, we need constantly to appropriate this insight of Therese and to draw from it consequences both theoretical and practical, doctrinal and pastoral, personal and communal. We need boldness and interior freedom to do so.
A new pope?
Like wildfire, the opinions escalate: these characteristics are critical for the next pope.
“Listen to me!”
“Here is the man we need!”
But the next Holy Father requires only one attribute: faith in the Holy Name of Jesus. Hence, desiring his will, eschewing the world and all its empty promises.
