Our spirituality forms our inner lives and is then lived outwardly in the world, which is to live a life of love and justice for others. - Fr Richard Rohr, "Daily Meditation"
To my ego Lucy, each of Jesus's two commandments has its own uh-oh. The first: We can love God totally with heart, soul and strength, but mind? We've got to think about that. The second: We want to love our neighbor, but what if our neighbor is a bigot, a louse, a loser? The enemy, in a word. What then?
The eyebrows-up answer is we love him, of course. But put a name on that enemy and see how far we get: What if the enemy is named Gertrude...or Trump? We are taught that we are not to love the enemy for what she can do for us, we are to love the enemy for what we can do for them. Try walking that unto breathing it...and we have our cross to bear.
If we will stay with it, we'll come to see the good news disguised as dross. The gold emerges when we realize our cross is not a person, any person...it is our resistance to the person(s). It is our own rigid, righteous and right judgment of the person.
Our holdback is our reasoning mind's unwillingness to give over, give up, give in not to wrong but to the one whom we see as wrong.
The first glimmer of light comes when we realize we are not asked to cede to the person, we are asked to see wrong and try to right it...without hate in our heart. For that matter, I doubt wrong can be righted for long when hate is the motivator.
It is our own decision to make that determines our daily comfort. When we decide to love, to go beyond reason to love, then we can rest our weary mind knowing that the Father within does the work. The work is done by our hands and feet which are on loan to the Father...we are freed from the worry about the how of it Now.
Thank you.
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