Catholic Exchange

The Challenge to Love

Written by

Patrice Fagnant-MacArthur

in

In the Great Commandment, Jesus tells us to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Sometimes, loving God seems to be the easier part of that mandate. While loving God and maintaining a relationship with a God who often seems hidden can certainly be a challenge, loving the person standing in front of us can be even harder.

We often love our neighbors in the abstract. We can give food to food banks and money to homeless shelters. These are good things to do. But what do we do when confronted by a beggar on the street, or when someone sits next to us in church who hasn't showered in a while? How do we respond when we are confronted with the realities of poverty among us?

What about the people we work with? It can be difficult to love a supervisor or a co-worker whose goal seems to be to make our own life miserable. What if there is someone who has spread malicious gossip about us? What if someone has let us take the blame for her own error?

Then there are the people in our own families. Sometimes it is hardest to love those that we are closest to. We know their faults and they know ours. Our spouses may grate on our nerves. Our children may be in the midst of rebellion. Our parents and siblings may still treat us like we are children. Especially at holidays, old battles can be re-fought and old wounds re-opened. How can we respond with love when we feel like we are coming under attack?

Yes, the mandate to love is quite a challenge. Jesus asks us to put other people first. He asks us to see God within those around us, even in situations when that is most hard to see. Jesus asks us to give of ourselves, to reach out to our neighbor in need, whether that neighbor lives under our own roof, or spends their days in the cubicle next to us, or panhandles from us on the street. Jesus asks us to love as He loves — a tall order to be sure, but Jesus does not ask the impossible. We all have God's love within us and the capacity to share that love. We can smile. We can share what we have. We can offer a kind word. In doing so, we can begin to plant seeds of love around us. We can begin to respond to the challenge.

Comments

  1. Guest Avatar
    Guest

    Yes, the mandate to “love our neighbor” is difficult especially when we have been injured socially by someone. I wonder how to deal with people when this happens. Do I ignore it all or do I gently talk to the offender and try to learn why he/she is acting this way? Right now I act as if nothing unusual has happened, but inside I seethe with resentment at some “perceived” insult to me.

  2. Guest Avatar
    Guest

    This is best done as we become servants. Christ said, ” I come to serve, and not to be served”. Come in this way in all that you do, and you will love your neighbor.

  3. Guest Avatar
    Guest

    If you can talk gently to the person and you think it will truly bring a resolution, then use your best judgment in pursuing the matter. Otherwise it is best to ignore it and “turn the other cheek”. Take comfort in knowing that God sees the truth and will be pleased with you for your own peaceful behavior. Depending on the character of the offender, trying to reason with him/her could make things even worse for you. Channel your resentment into a realization that the offender is probably suffering in even greater ways or would not feel the need to cause trouble in the first place, and then pray for that person.

  4. Guest Avatar
    Guest

    Love is not tolerance. Tolerance is indifference and indiffrence is the opposite of love.

    Let’s suppose you see a man half crazed ready to jump into a fire and kill himself, maybe because he belives the fire is really a wonderful bathtub.

    Which is more loving. To try and talk to the man gently and reason with him yet to nothing to prevent him from walking into the fire or to tackle him to the ground and hold him down hoping he will come to his senses?

    God is love and Jesus is God. Jesus fashioned a whip out of chord and drove people out of the temple. he did it out of love for them and the temple.
    Agian he yelled in the public square to the pharisies “you brood of vipers,
    you are white washed tombs with dead mans bones inside”. do you think he
    yelled it gently? The idea the gentelness is the core of love is a false idea and leads to a false and flimsy love. To love someone means to sincerly and with all your heart want what is BEST for that person. sometimes a person needs a gentel and loving hand. Sometimes they need to see and feel the hurt and anger they have caused someone else and by hiding it from them you are doing them a diservice. By NOT calling someone on the sins they have committed we often do them disservice. It can be much less comfortable and embaressing and the greatest possible service from the deeptest love to bring to the forfront the sins being commited in a room, by others and by ourselves. Always start with yourself though.

    But in all things we must be guided by the spirt.
    We must speak gently when he guides us and scream in anger when he guides us
    we must not act anything on our own and we must do all things in humility from a sense of weekness ever vigilant that pride might creep in.

  5. Guest Avatar
    Guest

    That is beautiful. I have done tried to reason with a person when the issue was fresh, and the entire problem got 10 times worse.

  6. Guest Avatar
    Guest

    I think the person meant the word “gentle” simply as an alternative to approaching the offender in an angry, accusing tone, which would only make matters worse. I don’t think it was meant as a synonym for love or tolerance. I agree with you that some sins do need to be exposed and addressed, but that each situation is unique and therefore must be individually judged as to the best course of action – or inaction – as the case may be.

  7. Guest Avatar
    Guest

    Indeed, as previously stated love is not tolerance; and indifference is the opposite of love. But tolerance need not be indifference.

    The real distinction is that tolerance applies to conduct, not to persons. When Johnnie misbehaves in class, his (competent) teacher will let his misbehavior go only to a point wherein it might start to be detrimental to others, to class order, to instructional matters, to Johnnie himself; or it poses some other unacceptible problems.

    In the meantime, the teacher is not tolerating Johnnie but is tolerating a degree of his unorthodox conduct.

    Current American employment of English is loaded with improper use of so many terms such as “tolerance”, many promoted by product advertising, some by ex-athletes (and others) who become tv announcers and some by social interests (such as talking about “choice” as being sooo(!) good – while deliberately omitting spoken mention of “choice of what?”

    Our culture needs a cleanup of both vocabulary and the sloppy thinking that is concurrent with careless language (much of which emanates deliberately from special-interest deceptiveness).

    Getting back to love, here’s a bit of reality that might begin to help Americans realize just what love (such a vital part of life) really is and isn’t:

    ABORTION = LOVE VIOLATED

    Whose love does Abortion violate? The answer to that is “Those named in the Greatest Commandments whom we are ordered to love: God and neighbor”. “Which neighbors?” one might ask. Well, for starters: two; the helpless one living in the womb and her mother who, often, has been deceived and/or pressured (by persons and society) into employing her “exclusive”, legal “right” to order that little neighbor’s violent execution.

    Now, getting back to “indifference”, truly, as stated in trionfo’s post: it’s “the opposite of love”. To Whom do Americans offer their final justification for being eligible to vote but not caring sufficiently about the dire plight of their two neighbors violated by abortion to offer them the simple but powerful support resident in their ballot?

    Earthly “authorities”, such as the Supreme Court will not be the Final Arbitor.

    How topsy-turvy are our times!

  8. Guest Avatar
    Guest

    I think the person meant the word “gentle” simply as an alternative to approaching the offender in an angry, accusing tone, which would only make matters worse.

    the question to ask is weather or not an angry accusing tone is what they need.
    it very well may be exactly what is needed for the good of the other.
    What it must not come out of is pride. A person can however be justly angry and
    it is dishonest to ‘control’ ones tones and emotions when it is not what you are really feeling. even a child sees through that kind of dishonesty and somewhere in the back of thier mind writes of the speaker as insincery.

    sincerity is best. What the struggle is is to have sincerly from right motives.

    Are you truely motivated by injust because you love the other or are you motivated by pride because you have been hurt? If you have been hurt tears are the emotion that matches the situation assuming you can love someone enough to be that vulnerable.

    Sincerity and integrity to the core real emotion expressed in real love is what people need. Not ‘controled tones’ and ‘tolerance’ not letting it slide, but joy in doing right and true concern in doing wrong.

    ( not that I’m saying I’m completely there. That kind of vulnerabilty requires
    heroic virute and self abandoment an absolute trust in God.
    what I’m really talking about is humiliy. )

    ‘he(Jesus) did not consider holiness something to be grasp at but rather emptied himself and took the form of a man’ — somewhere in the bible but I don’t have time to look it up.

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