“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt 22:36-39)
Love is a difficult word. In our day, its meaning is often debased or trivialized by the media and popular culture. The film Love Actually (2003), for example, presents it as a flurry of passionate feelings and fairy tale endings. The sense in which our Scriptures use the word is so much wider and deeper. In the book of Deuteronomy, for example, love denotes the binding relationship of mutual fidelity and responsibility between God and his chosen people. Christian thinkers such as Augustine and others have shown how this most noble of emotions is far more than mere feeling, but moves us toward the good, the true and the beautiful, forming the foundation of morality and justice. In any case, it is a concept that needs to be made concrete, lest we become either romantics or cynics.
St Benedict places the love commandments at the center of his Rule, and proceeds to spell out some of the nitty gritty that is involved in practicing them:
“This, then, is the good zeal which monks must foster with fervent love: They should each try to be the first to show respect to the other (Rom 12:10), supporting with the greatest patience one another’s weaknesses of body or behavior, and earnestly competing in obedience to one another. No one is to pursue what he judges better for himself, but instead, what he judges better for someone else. To their fellow monks they show the pure love of brothers; to God, loving fear; to their abbot, unfeigned and humble love. Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life.” (RB 72:3-12)
What is love, really? These lines make plain that love is to be practiced laboriously in the context of other people, whose needs and preferences often clash with my own. I am called to accept, respect and affirm others, allowing my own preferences to be relativized in practical matters. As one of our recently deceased sisters said, “In the monastery there is no such thing as ‘I prefer.’” Really? Ouch.
“True Charity consists in bearing with all the defects of our neighbor, in not being surprised at his failings, and in being edified by his least virtues.” (St Therese)
“Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned against Christ.” (St Antony the Great)