Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
A bit over a month ago I had decided that the associates’ fall retreat would be on Spiritual Intimacy- Intimacy with God, Intimacy with Self, and Intimacy with Others, in other words, love of God, love of self, love of neighbor. At a recent meeting, it came up that a substitute preacher was needed for today. I immediately offered to cover since today is the last day of the associates’ retreat and it would be lovely to end it by preaching. I had no idea then this was the Gospel lesson for today. I have to wonder if God is trying to tell me something.
Everything hangs on love. But what is this love? Love is a word that is overused, misused, and even abused in contemporary popular culture. “I love that Netflix’s series. It’s awesome.” “I loved that book. It was a great read.” “I loved that trip! That was my favorite vacation.” “I love chocolate.” “If I loved you, time and again I would try to say all I want you to know.” “I wanna be loved with inspiration. I wanna be loved starting tonight.” “I love you so much!” “Bye. Love you.” It is clear that in our contemporary context we really think of love as a feeling. We fall in love. Love happens at first sight. Love is blind and can also break our hearts. Thought of this way, love is something over which we have little control or agency.
But Jesus tells the Pharisees (and us!) that love is the greatest and first commandment. It’s not a matter of our preference or whether we feel like it. And he does not end his statement to the Pharisees with: “And I hope love happens to you.” Oh no, because it is not a matter of good fortune. It is a matter of discipline, and practice, and effort, and ultimately, obedience. The very essence of all of Christian faith is to love God, to love neighbor and to love self. How are we to do this? We do it with intentionality, commitment and discipline.
Jesus modeled for us how we ought to nurture our relationship with God through obedience, solitude, prayer and contemplation. We know that he began his ministry by spending forty days alone in the desert, not because he wanted to challenge himself to see how strong he was; not because he wanted to have a nice vacation away from it all. He did it because the Spirit led him (Luke 4:1), and he obeyed. It is clear that to minister to others we first have to encounter and face our own demons. In prayer and contemplation, we realize God is always with us and God’s reign is within us. We are never alone but are always in the presence of the only and the ultimate Unconditional Love.
Saint Paul repeatedly referred to the human body in his writings. For him the church is the Body of Christ (Rm 7:4). He used the body as a metaphor to describe spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 12). In his letter to the Romans, he wrote: “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rm 12:1). Our body is described as a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19) and in the next verse, he advices to “glorify God in your body.”
As people of faith in the twenty-first century, we understand that our body is given to us in trust. It is our responsibility to make wise choices that keep our bodies healthy, to the best of our ability. These choices include healthy eating, regular exercise, adequate sleep, and how we respond to stress in our minds and hearts as they relate to our bodies.
We cannot love our neighbor if we don’t love ourself. Loving ourselves is about building our capacity to love in general. The more we surrender and learn to love those parts about ourself that are hard for us to love, those traits that seem to be part of our DNA and we struggle to learn to live with, the more our capacity to love others widens.
Nonattachment is vital to show this kind of love to others in a healthy way. Nonattachment is implicitly woven throughout Jesus’ teachings about love. He taught about the impossibility of loving both God and money (Matt 6:24), and warned of the danger of attachment to material possessions (Matt 19: 16-30) or even one’s family (Matt 10:37).
Nonattachment involves letting go of our hold on the physical, psychological and spiritual things that reinforce our orientation toward possessiveness. Letting go of the need for power, control, safety, security, approval, and praise. Letting go of the need to be defined by feelings, thoughts, beliefs or the things we can accomplish or possess. Not allowing our life circumstances to determine the fundamental state of our mind and heart. Exercising nonattachment means that we do not let anything less than love define who we are.
We humans tend to build our own realities and make sense of the world through stories, and by fitting people and things into categories and narratives. These narratives simplify our experience of a world that is fundamentally complicated and most often paradoxical. The narrative we have built about who someone is colors our expectation about what they say. The narrative we have built about who we are colors how we respond. Nonattachment keeps us from expecting confirmation of what we already believe about the other person. When we exercise nonattachment, we detach from our story about them so that we can be fully present to listen. We stay open to the idea that we all can learn, change and grow. We stay open to periodically updating our narrative about ourself and our relationships. So, nonattachment allows us to love more compassionately and more deeply, without clinging, obsessing or projecting our fears and issues onto others.
Christian faith is not a do-it-yourself spirituality. We need each other. Loving God is incomplete without loving our neighbor as we love ourselves because Jesus called us to “feed the poor, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, set the prisoners free.” They are our neighbors. Notice that Jesus doesn’t tell the Pharisees: “Believe the right things.” He doesn’t say: “Carefully judge your neighbor’s actions so you can know whether or not they should belong.” He doesn’t say “You shall worship this way.” He doesn’t say: “You shall attend this kind of church.” No, in the fullness of time it will all be about how well we loved, how well we acted justly and loved mercy and walked humbly (Micah 6:8). The greatest commandment said Jesus is to love- love God, love self, love neighbor. That’s right, that neighbor who doesn’t necessarily share our likes and dislikes, culture, race, gender, sexual orientation, political views, faith. ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo!
~Amen+
No comments:
Post a Comment