Learning to Love Our Neighbors

Returning to Barbara Brown Taylor's book, another insight that has stayed with me involves the centrality of learning to love others as ourselves - really loving them as they are and not as someone we might seek to change or even help. Here's how she puts it:

"The wisdom of the Desert Fathers includes the wisdom that the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it...[This] may be the only real spiritual discipline there is" (93).

I think there's some profound truth to be found in these words. It can be so easy to get caught up in our own agendas, priorities or worries that learning to love our neighbor as ourselves means engaging in the challenging work of loving other people as they are and perhaps also learning to love ourselves that way, too. Maybe, in a way, it means gaining an ever so faint experience of what God's love is really like.

Peace,
Padre Chuck