Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it
directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me,
going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.
Little — be always little! Be simple, poor,
childlike.
Preach the Gospel with your life — without
compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.
Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray,
fast. Pray always, fast.
Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet.
Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.
Pray always. I will be your rest.
The Little Mandate of Madonna
House
Love... love... love, never counting the cost. –
We are going through the Little Mandate, the core words of our MH
vocation, each Tuesday on the blog. Today we come to this most challenging
sentence: love without ever counting the cost.
The
three-fold repetition of love is not without meaning here. It implies a choice
made over and over again in life. To choose to love is not a one-time affair;
it has to be done every day, multiple times each day.
It sound
cheesy and hippie-ish to say it, but it is my firm conviction (and in fact the
clear teaching of Christ, which is rather more important) that this is the
answer to all the world’s woes and the terrible evils of our time. To love
without counting the cost, to love without measure or limit or end to our love.
It sounds
like a hippy slogan (‘All you need is love, da da da da daaaa!’) because our
notion of love is so poor and sentimental. Love for us is either warm cozy
feelings and puppy dog cuteness or it is eroticized display. But neither of
those things is love, particularly. You may have warm feelings or sexual desire
for this or that person, and neither of these is contradictory to love, but
love itself is neither of those.
To love is
to desire the good for the other, and to pursue that good, to choose that good
as if it were one’s own deepest good. In our world today, we think ‘love’ means
never hurting anyone’s feelings, but this does not stand up to a moment’s
analysis, does it? Some of the best things that have happened to me have
involved very hurt feelings on my part, painful realizations of truth about
myself or about life. It is not love, but cowardly selfishness, that seeks to
protect the other person from some difficult truth lest their feelings be hurt.
Love and
truth walk hand in hand. We cannot really know the good of the other nor pursue
it as if it were our own if we do not know the objective truth of things and
the subjective truth of where this person is, what their life is like. Love
involves a lot of listening, a lot of careful and compassionate attention to
the other.
And love
requires interior integrity, my own fidelity to the Truth about reality. As a
Roman Catholic, I firmly believe that truth about reality is revealed by Jesus
Christ in Scripture and Tradition, preserved and handed on faithfully by the
magisterium of the Catholic Church. And so a loving choice can never be a
choice to compromise that truth or deny it in service of ‘friendly relations’.
At the same
time, as love requires truth, so truth requires great love, great generosity,
great kindness and gentleness and mercy. All of which comes at enormous cost,
if we take any of this at all seriously and actually put it into practice. It
is the hard and narrow path of the Gospel, and there are so many easier ways to
live, constantly available to us.
The way of
false tolerance, where we just pretend that everyone’s OK and that nothing
really matters anyhow. The way of anger and harshness, where we set ourselves
up as a little tribunal of judgment of everyone (and this is hardly limited to,
or even especially typical of religious people these days – it is epidemic).
The way of retreat into an enclave of like-minded friends. The way of oblivion,
selfish concern for one’s own affairs.
And probably
a half-dozen other easy ways, none of which do anything in the slightest to
heal the world’s ills and make everything so much worse, really. To assume the
cost of real love, real compassionate service, real sacrifice and real giving
of oneself to everyone God puts before you, and to not ‘count’ that cost—that is
what heals the world.
And this ‘not
counting’ means that there is never a time that comes when we say ‘no more love
for this one!’ Never a time when anyone can do anything, no matter how heinous,
that would remove them from the circle of our love, our concern, our
compassion, our prayer, our desire for their good. And that is of the utmost
importance—it is too easy to write people off these days, to join the baying
crowd of condemnation or to consign people to the outer darkness of our
contempt.
But if we
think hard and clear about that, that is the culture of death in action, isn’t
it? The culture of death says that the value of a person is contingent on what
they do or can do—fetuses and the disabled or elderly are less valuable and so
can be killed, and so forth (to put it rather baldly). But if I decide that
your value is lessened, that you are not worthy of my compassion or love
because of some misdeed or sin, then I am as much part of that culture of death
as an abortionist or a euthanasist.
No, love
without counting the cost, love everyone, compassion and mercy for everyone, in
truth, in integrity—this is what we need today. It is anything but sentimental
and cheesy; it is the rocky road to Calvary, but beyond that to the joy and
beauty of Easter.
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