Word to the Wise
Wednesday, January 7, 2009 - St. Raymond of Penyafort, OP (Dominican priest and canonist)
[1 John 4:11-18 and Mark 6:45-52]If God so loved us, we also must love one another. No ne has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.....God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.
I think I have mentioned before a felt banner I once had with a picture on it of a character from the cartoon, "Peanuts," Linus van der Pelt! The caption under his earnest stance says, "I love humanity. It's people I hate!" The invisible reality was easier because it demanded little in the way of the messy and difficult ins and outs of human love! Linus' statement offers a very good opening to the first scripture for today. The challenge is simply put: We cannot claim to love God if we do not love neighbor. It is not possible to separate out two different forms of love with two different standards and work less on one because we find it too difficult. Jesus makes it clear in the gospels that love of God AND neighbor are at the center of his teaching. There are two extremes to be avoided. The first considers everything in terms of neighbor and activism. This really becomes simply a form of humanism. We cannot worship our neighbor! The second extreme to be avoided is a kind of abstraction. God is invisible and becomes a matter of our own mental and psychological processes by which we imagine ourselves in love with God while avoiding contact with neighbor! This is a kind of "solipsism" which provides us with a God of our own designs! The writings in the Johannine literature tend to be abstract and psychological. We have to put them into a very real context of actual human persons who may be difficult to love! The same can be true of God when we feel that life has treated us cruelly and unfairly. The first one we often blame is God! Our neighbor is not equivalent to God but we cannot ignore God's presence by grace in other human persons. The challenge is a daily one and requires a lot of self honesty to accomplish in practice - as I think we all know from experience. But the reward, as the scripture points out, is great. God is present when we truly love one another. AMEN
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