17th Sunday after Pentecost 1.10.06 Love God and neighbour
We have to love both God and neighbour. Hard to love either, because in God’s case He is invisible and in the neighbour’s case, he is visible!
With God we find Him abstract and difficult to connect with.
Yet we can work our way towards Him and find by various paths that He is loveable (literally adorable) and we love Him spontaneously.
Of course it is a strange thing to be commanded to love something, since love seems such a personal matter.
Imagine being commanded to love spinach! Love as just a feeling does not obey commands; it either goes that way or it doesn’t.
But love as an action can respond to command, and this is what is being referred to:
Love God means to do what He says, to act according to His will, to try to please Him.
To obey the command applicable to the present moment is one way to love Him and to discover how to love Him.
When we do the right thing we receive an insight into the mind/nature of God and we come to love what we discover. There is something intrinsically good about what we discover.
The only reason the whole world does not love God is that He is difficult to locate amidst all the noise and confusion.
So people give up the search and they say: He does not exist, or He does not matter, or He is ‘out there somewhere’, cold and remote.
No, we must do better than that. We must search like the lady in the Song of Songs, go through the streets till we find Him.
When we do we will experience great rapture as everything will then fall into place.
We will find, in the famous words of St.Augustine, that our hearts are made for Him and cannot rest until they come to rest in Him.
How do we find Him? By obedience and also by prayer and reflection.
Come to where He is. Ask Him to make Himself known, and He will.
We can find Him in the help He provides in everyday matters where we see the fruits of His love. He is the mysterious benefactor that sets up the world we live in, opens doors in advance of when we reach them.
It is He who provides the sunlight, the air you breathe, the clothes you wear, the ground you walk on, the family you were born into, the brains by which you can think, the many fascinating things which attract and interest you.
It is He who has been there from the beginning of your life and will still be there at the end. It is He who fills the whole universe with His being, knowing every particle of creation and what is happening with it.
Logically of course we can reason that if God made all the people and things we love, He must be greater than they are and must therefore be even more loveable.
So if you would rather go to the football or the beach than to Church, then just consider who invented football or who created the beach.
If we can find such a Being then we have everything else as well.
So, coming logically, practically, mystically, every possible way, we arrive at this Supreme Being who is Love.
We love Love because we cannot resist.
We are being commanded to do something we cannot help doing. It is like being commanded to breathe or eat.
Only in this case we have to search a little bit before it becomes so obvious.
Every person, no matter how unlikely it might seem at first, is called to love God, and is made for that purpose more than any other.
There is a magnetic pull drawing everyone to find this perfect Love. We must not resist that pull. It is our destiny, and if we do this we will also help others to find where they belong.
