Lectio
“Hungry for love, He looks at you. Thirsty for kindness, He begs from you. Naked for loyalty, He hopes in you. Sick and imprisoned for friendship, He wants from you. Homeless for shelter in your heart, He asks of you. Will you be that one to Him?”
—Saint Teresa of Calcutta, No Greater Love
Meditatio
Our Lord asks of us that, when we look in the face of another, we see His face. That we see the face of Love. That we see the face of God. For in each and every one of us exists the image and likeness of He who created us. And so to hate another, to hurt another, or to reject, abandon, or deny another is to do this to the image and likeness of God in them, and therefore to God Himself.
And so He asks us to love each and every one of His children, even those who call us enemy, even those who persecute us, and even those who would crucify us for loving Him and for loving them. Because, to love our neighbor is, in its own way, to love God Himself.
But this is difficult. Others make it difficult and we make it difficult — their brokenness and our brokenness makes it difficult. Their brokenness makes it difficult to love them, and our brokenness, enslaving us to selfishness and self-centeredness, makes it difficult to love anyone besides ourselves.
The world, and the devil’s whispers inside of us, will do their best to convince us of our own self-justification, that it is only right to do unto others as they do unto us. To live this way is to live life on the world’s terms. But Jesus tells us that we are called to something different, to something better, even if more challenging — to live our lives on God’s terms, and to be perfect as He is perfect.
This means loving everyone, unconditionally and unwaveringly. But it especially means loving those who may seem to be unloveable or unloving themselves. It means treating even the parts of others that we find to be ungodly as if they have divine potential — the imago Dei — because they do, just like the ungodly parts of us have this same divine potential. After all, even the most self-interested among us manage to love those who are kind to them — that requires nothing of us.
And so Christ asks us to do the difficult thing. He asks us to carry the cross of worldly suffering for the sake of Godly love. He asks us, through Him, to transcend the parts of ourselves that are unloving that we may love the parts of others that feel unlovable. But He does not ask us to do this without His aid. He does this with and for us, that we may do this with and for Him because He loves us and He loves our neighbors in exactly the same way He calls us to love them as we love ourselves — because He is Love and His deepest desire is that we become Love with Him.
Just as Christ held a special place in His heart for the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, and the poor, He asks us to make space in our hearts for them as well. He asks this not as a mere act of charity, but as an act of Godly love poured out for another. And in this way, He invites us to be God with God — not as ourselves increased, but as ourselves decreased, that His love alone might be seen increasing in the world through us. For where love is poured out for the helpless — for the untouchable and the unlovable — God is there in that act. His Blood and His Body are upon the altar still, given over that, through His sacrifice, we all may live.
And when we make of our own lives an altar for another — when we let what is hungry and thirsty and lonely in our neighbor be fed and welcomed in us — we do not add to His sacrifice. So we become an embodiment of Christ’s eternal sacrifice here and in this moment. We become His body on the cross of love for those who need it most, and in this way, we become Christ for Christ through Christ.
Oratio
Become You
You stretched out your hand
touched my wounded heart
when I was untouchable
You showed me your heart
opened your loving arms to me
when I was unlovable
You called me home
to leave behind this pain
when I was not yet ready
but You were patient
Your love persistent
when I was unworthy
You healed my heart
You made me clean
when will I become You?
Contemplatio
What hunger, what thirst, what homelessness have you walked past today without recognizing His face in it?
Related Scripture
“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”
— 1 Corinthians 12:27 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Becoming Worship: Silence, Consent, and the Sacred Dance, which traces the same “we become” movement from a different door — not through love poured out for the unlovable neighbor, but through the silence and consent that let worship itself become incarnate in us.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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