Fr. Ron Rolheiser, in his article, “Measuring Ourselves in Love,” writes that the older we get, the more we begin to know love’s dark side. We fall in love and think it will last forever, but then fall out of love, feel love go sour, feel love grow cold, see love betrayed, feel ourselves wounded by love, and wound others. Finally, even more upsetting, we all find that there are always people in our lives who are cold, bitter, and unforgiving towards us so that it is not always easy to feel love and be loving.
Jesus’ most important commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you!” is too easily read simplistically, romantically, and in a one-sided, over-confident manner. But this command contains the most important challenge of the whole gospel and, like the deepest part of the gospel to which it is linked, the crucifixion, it is very, very difficult to imitate. Why?
It’s easy to consider ourselves as loving if we only look at one side of things, namely, how we relate to those people who are loving, warm, respectful, and gracious towards us. But if we begin to look at the skeletons in our relational closets, our naive confidence soon disappears: What about the people who hate us, whom we don’t like? What about the people whom we avoid and who avoid us? What about those people towards whom we feel resentment? What about those people whom we haven’t been able to forgive?
There’s a sobering challenge in an old Stevie Nicks’ song, Golddust Woman: She suggests that it’s good that, at a point in life, someone “shatters our illusion of love” because far too often, blind to its own true intentions, our love is manipulative and self-serving. Too often, the song points out, we are lousy lovers who unconsciously pick our prey. What shatters our illusion of love is the presence in our lives of people who hate us. They’re the test. It’s here where we have to measure up: If we can love them, we’re real lovers, if we can’t, we’re still under a self-serving illusion.
We close today’s reflection with some inspiring words from by Archbishop José H. Gomez’s article, “The Love Commandment.”
“Jesus knows that love is not easy. There are people who are not easy to like and who are not easy to love. But his love calls us to move beyond our own comfort, our own prejudices. That is why Jesus connects the love of God and the love of neighbor, because Jesus knows we cannot really say we love God if we do not love our neighbor. When we close our eyes to our neighbor’s needs, we close our hearts to God.
One of the saints said, ‘We love God as much as we love the one we love the least.’ And love is like anything else in our lives. The more we do it, the more it becomes a habit. Practice love and, by the grace of God, it will become perfect in you. So that means we need to make that decision to love — every day, in every moment. We need to say, ‘Lord, give me the grace to love — right here and right now. In this situation. With this person.'”