Love is Union of Hearts — Twenty Second Week of “Ordinary Time,” September 1- 7, 2012

Everybody knows that the Greatest Commandment is to love: love God as All, and our neighbor, no longer “as ourselves,” but according to Christ’s “new commandment” — “Love one another as I have loved you.” Which is humanly impossible.

So we love by surrender to “grace” — that is, to the divine Life of God within us. This really means surrender to the living Persons of Father, Son and Spirit living in us, uniting us to the Life they are living, acting in and through us, letting us share in their own divine life and action. To act by grace is to act by God.

The opposite of love is hate. But few of us really hate anybody else. So, to be practical, we have to ask what the “groundlevel opposite” is to love. It is disunion.

After giving his “new commandment,” Jesus prayed to the Father:

“I ask... on behalf of those who will believe in me... that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

This is how Jesus is “glorified” in the Church. Our unity is the visible proof of his victory over sin.

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

We forget this constantly. At least, I do. I “fight for the right.” I condemn errors and those who are teaching them. And when I am accused of error (always falsely, of course!), I don’t make peace; I make war. I know only too well what Gandhi meant when he spoke of the “rage of being right.”

Then God says to me through Paul:

Let no evil talk come out of your mouth, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God...

Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you... Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us...

When I’m right, I’m wrong;

When I’m strong, I’m weak.

When I’m weak, I’m strong.

When I’m wrong, I seek.

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