God and neighbor

The commands to love God and to love our neighbor as ourself seem simple, and are easy to agree with, but are not always easy to carry out. Sometimes the things that seem most simple and obvious, perhaps because we hear them so often, are the most difficult to do.

Loving God and neighbor are not feelings, but actions. What is the loving thing to do in the situations of our life? To love God above all things means, first of all, to be in touch with what God asks of us, which we learn through our prayer and reflection both on Scripture and on our life experiences, where we also find God.

Our reflection gives us a sense of what the Spirit of God is asking of us in our day-to-day life, something that is not always easy to discern, but which brings us true joy and fulfillment, whether it’s a large-scale discernment, such as what field of work I want to enter, or who is it that I will marry, or how will I spend my retirement years; or smaller, but also important, every-day discernments, such as how do I resolve an argument I’m having with a friend or colleague, or how do I relate to relatives who have a completely different, and annoying, political outlook on domestic and world events, or what would be the best way for us to vacation as a family this year?

And we often don’t do well in loving our neighbor, do we? It can be particularly challenging when that neighbor is different from us in race or ethnicity or religion or political persuasion or in any of the ways people are different from each other. This is the challenge of the gospel we are called to receive and to act upon.

“Love justice, you who judge the earth, think of the Lord in goodness, and seek him in integrity of heart.” (Wisdom 1:1)

The images from this post are from Montserrat, Spain, on a pilgrimage in 2012.