During September I started each day by reading the morning prayer, the daily bible readings, and the meditation of the day in the “Magnificat.” I found that when I started the day in this way, I was able to keep God more in the forefront of my mind throughout the rest of the day. Of all the meditations, there was one that I kept thinking about for a few days after I read it.
The Gospel reading on the day that I read this meditation was Luke 6:27-38 which is the reading about loving our enemies and treating people as we wish to be treated. The meditation was written by Father Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, a Dominican preacher from the mid-1800s. Father Lacordaire wrote about love in a way that was compelling to me. He wrote, “[f]or the peculiar quality of love is to unite those who love one another, to blend their thoughts, their desires, their sentiments, all the expressions, and all the blessings of their life, and to penetrate even to the substance of the loved one, in order to cleave to it with a force as invincible as it is ardent.”
The language Father Lacordaire uses says something beautiful about love whether it’s romantic love, love between family members, love for God, or God’s love for us. As the Gospel says, it is easy for people to love their children (or parents, partners, close friends, etc.) and to give their children good gifts; however, this isn’t the kind of love we’re especially called to and the kind of love that makes the world better.
The ideas about what love does and means in this meditation made me think a lot about if everyone took God’s call to love our enemies seriously. What if we had the kind of love Father Lacordaire describes for our enemies? What about the poor? The oppressed? The forgotten?
Whether we realize it or not, we make people who are poor and people who are oppressed our enemies. If not conscientiously, we make them our enemies by our actions—or inaction—and in our policies, laws, and social practices that perpetuate poverty and keep oppressed peoples and groups oppressed.
Many people worship God and think to “cleave” to God as the meditation suggests happens in love, but how many of us think to cleave ourselves to the poor, oppressed, and forgotten? Isn’t God in the poor and oppressed? What would the world look like if we really loved who God called us to love and as God calls us to love them? How could we possibly continue to oppress the oppressed if we shared their “substance”? If we got to know their experiences, pains, joys, struggles, thoughts, and desires?
To love the poor and oppressed as God calls means more than to give a gift at Christmas to a child in need or put together a gift basket or volunteer a day a month at the local soup kitchen or give annually to a charitable cause. It even means more—much more—than doing a year of service. All of these things are good and a step in the right direction, but I’m not sure they’re love. Of course, it isn’t easy to love the poor and oppressed because we have to look at our own lives and behaviors. Even harder, once we share their substance, we’ll have to change.
Maybe we believe we already know the substance of the poor and oppressed. Maybe we believe we already know what they want and what they need. But, how can we really know until we’ve stopped judging and truly gotten to know people? Until we’ve leaned about their lives on a deeper level? Until we’ve united ourselves to them? The more you get to know and really understand someone, the harder it is for you to make them your enemy.
Here is another question—what if we really don’t love the poor, the oppressed, and the forgotten? Perhaps we can lean to love them by working backwards to understand their substance, hopes, thoughts, and struggles, as well as the blessings of their lives. Maybe in coming to understand these things by living in solidarity with the poor we may come to love them and to see that those who were once our enemies are now people we love with a love that is both “invincible” and “ardent.” If we do this, how can we possibly be the same?
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