To Love your God with your whole being is daunting in and of itself. However, today’s Gospel issues one more challenge to us after quoting the passage from Deuteronomy. It challenges us to love your neighbor as yourself. This, he reminds us, is worth more than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices.
This command should stop us in our tracks. Love our neighbor as ourselves? What does that look like? Who is our neighbor?
It takes great courage to love our neighbors as ourselves. In a country and world, divided by fear and hatred of anyone deemed “other,” we are called to see every person as neighbor... regardless of their country of origin, gender or sexuality, economic status, education or employment level, how they live or how they worship. We must be open to encounter… to moving beyond fear and hatred… and into community.
May we be beacons of love that brings about justice and peace. May we, as I say in my vow formula, “strive to share the love of Jesus through the message of the Gospel and the witness of my (our) life.” May this be the way we live out our radical call from God. May we have the courage to love God with our whole heart and our whole being and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
--Eilis McCulloh, HM
Image source: Gustave Courbet, Le Désespéré (1843), https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/art/features/why-gustave-courbet-still-has-the-power-to-shock-744386.html
Quotation source
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