How Do I?
The question based on today’s Gospel (Matt 22:34-40) was as sincere as it was direct, as many questions often are when coming from an eighth grader: “Mr. Jasper, we always hear the same thing over-and-over: love God with all your heart, soul and mind, but no one ever tells us how.” There was a brief pause, and then: “So how do we?”
The insight floored me at the time; it still does, quite frankly. This 13-year-old from a working-class suburb of Philly whose family struggled on a variety of levels was finally saying out loud what most people (myself included) have been reluctant to admit: I don’t know how to love God the way I am asked to, and no one is teaching me how.
I wish I knew what I said to that class of eighth graders at that time. No doubt it included words like: pray; go to Mass; use the sacrament of Confession. Not bad answers. All true, in fact.
But I was barely in my late 20s then, and relatively new in my own renewed journey of discipleship. If that same student asked the same question today – nearly twenty years later – here’s what I would say:
Loving God with all our heart means that we long to give Him ours; to open up that space within where the love we have for others -- and even for ourselves -- comes from Him and then is returned to Him. It’s easy to say, of course, but how is this practically lived-out?
Step One: Loving God means becoming gentle with others. Not excusing bad behavior, and not becoming a doormat for them. Being gentle means that we are willing to hold in our own hearts the fact that others have been hurt, broken, and carry a weight of anxiety and fear that shapes nearly every decision they make. How many times did our Lord enter another person’s mess and say to them, “I see you – really see you -- and I love you, even in the chaos of your life?”
Step Two: Loving God with all our heart also means that we are willing to offer and receive the gift of mercy and forgiveness. To repeat often -- from the moments when we are overlooked and our efforts ignored to the times when a careless driver cuts us off or a friend fails to call: “Father, forgive them; they no not what they do.” It’s allowing the space of healing to shape the ways in which we interact with those who don’t always live up to the standards we often unknowingly place upon them – sometimes as heavy burdens.
Step Three is where the soul also comes into play along with the heart: The soul space is that intimate gift of self where God’s Presence is invited in to permeate every thought, word and action. The soul-space is where we burn with a longing to be one with God; to be transformed into God’s image and likeness; to unite who we are to all that He is, and to let Him direct our will, our day, our decisions, and our past and future journeys.
We can’t have real access to this space without prayer and sacraments. And thus the challenge: prayer is hard, and we can’t run from that. It can often seem dry and boring; results never seem to materialize in the ways or times we desire. Prayer requires effort, just as any activity or task in which we want to improve. Five minutes of prayer in the morning is good; but why is that all we give to God? Mass attendance for fifty minutes each week fulfills the obligation, but is that the only reason we are going?
If the soul is to expand, so must our prayer lives and our encounter with the sacramental grace. If you and I can watch three hours of TV or spend hours at the gym or scroll on our phones for mindless minutes, why can’t we offer some of that same time for God to reach our souls and increase its capacity for His grace? Doing so does not require constant retreats or a monk-like daily routine. Rather, it is simply the willingness to make specific time for God, especially when we don’t feel we have the time to do so. It is staying faithful to our prayer-life, even when we don’t want to. It’s relying on the sacraments for healing and wholeness when most often we want something else – usually a material item or mindless distraction – to help us avoid the hard work that a relationship with the Lord entails.
For make no mistake, the journey of heart-and-soul discipleship requires incredible strength, and loving God with that strength can only come from Cross-carrying.
What I didn’t dare say to that eighth grade class at the time – and what is often hard to put into words even now – is that authentic love of God and others can only come at the foot of the Cross.
That Cross will come in many ways, often at times that are most inconvenient. Picking-up our Cross hurts. It requires a great amount of sacrifice and self-emptying. It is daily, often unseen by others and very lonely.
The very human response to the Cross is to run. Shake fists at God, maybe even turn away from Him. For many, the Cross results in closed and walled-off hearts. “I will never love again or let myself by hurt.” For many, the Cross from which we try to run results in harmful distractions and sinful behaviors.
And yet, imagine if that Cross we carry is instead offered back to the Father as gift? What if we say to the Lord: Use this Cross to shape the way I love and purify my soul. Use this Cross to make me a saint. Let this Cross help my relatives and friends who are struggling; to save poor souls in purgatory; to bring light to the darkness of the modern world.
No Cross is wasted when offered and united to the Lord’s Cross on Calvary. In fact, it is here where the greatest strength comes. It is here where we love God in the way God has asked us to. And perhaps as equally important, it is at the Cross where we learn to love others and ourselves authentically.
What makes Jesus’ statement so radical in his response to the scholar of the law is not that he repeated the ‘Shema Israel’ as the main tenet of Jewish faith (Love God with heart, soul and strength) but that Jesus equated such all-powerful love with love of neighbor and self. We forget how radical this really is.
For when we love our neighbor with a Christ-like love, we are in fact loving God with all our heart, soul and strength. When we reach out to the least, the hated, the different, and the ones who often annoy us like a papercut rubbed with hand sanitizer, then we are allowing heart, soul and cross to guide the way forward as Christ himself would. The Book of Exodus (first reading) makes it abundantly clear: God says in relation to the foreigner, the poor neighbor and the widow: “I am compassionate.”
Literally: I suffer with. I am willing to carry their cross with them. To love them in that space where no one else will. To forgive. To serve without counting the cost. To put myself aside for the holiness of the other. If we do this, it will cost everything. We will end up obliterating our ego, and yet – both ironically and quite beautifully – we will actually find who we really are in the sight of God. We will reflect Him to the world. And in so doing, we will in fact love Him with all our heart, soul and mind.