Christian Duty/ where is the love?

One can look at the Old Testament as a book which looks at  the understanding and the nature of God. The book of Deuteronomy is one of the first five books of the Old Testament in one sense we can sum up the first five books with this passage. That there is one God and “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul” But, as we know the people of Israel struggled with this high ideal. We can see that seems to be a cycle of the people of Israel missing the mark, repentance and returning back to God.

In the passage there are three kinds of Love that are explored the love of God, worship in the Church, love of our neighbour and love of self.  It seems that many of us get the first bit although coming to Church for others is a bit of a challenge. But the other two parts of this statement are a little harder to understand.

For many people there seems to be a difference to what we do at Church and how we act in the street to our brother and sister. I have witnessed people shaking people’s hands in the Mass at the sign of peace but as soon as they get out of the Church they are completely different and won’t give the person the time of day.

We have people in the world that will not darken the Church because they do not see the effect in the people who go. The basic evangelisation is showing love to our neighbour to help those in need. These people we do not forget the kindness of another.

There is another issue that may cause us problems in the Gospel today and that is the words that Jesus says “Love your neighbour as you love yourself”

This may sound like a rather strange thing for Jesus to say?  After all we may think that one of the problems with society is the very fact that people love themselves rather too much but this is in many times is a quite abusive. Self love actually is quite important because without loving ourselves probably we can never really love others. And if we are bad at this then we need to practice it. One of the ways that I practice self love is doing something I enjoy everyday going for a walk or listening to a nice piece of music, enjoying our own company and importantly not feeling guilty when we are looking after ourselves. Sometimes this means saying no to people sometimes especially when we are feeling tired.  Loving and looking after ourselves then gives us the energy to help others.

And when we get it right then we can change people and ourselves. We as it were are able to be God on legs for others and to quote a song “To love another person is to see the face of God”  We show that face of God to others.