I Can Love You if I want to
Love God and Love your neighbor. These are the two greatest commandments. Just six words.
In 1976 I met a woman I will never forget. Her name was Lucy. I don’t think I ever knew her last name. I was finishing my first year in the convent and working on my BA. But in addition to that, we were asked to have a volunteer ministry out in the local community. I chose to work in the Activities Department of Calvary Hospital in the Bronx.
Calvary is a hospital for those with end-stage cancer. At that time, the average stay was a few weeks, as the person transitioned into the arms of God. The Activities Department for end-stage cancer patients, what was I thinking!
My task usually involved sitting beside the bed of one of the patients. We would play cards and talk. Mostly though, I would hold their hand or just sit silent and pray. That is where I met Lucy. Lucy was my assigned patient, and I spent a couple of hours with her a few times a week. I only knew Lucy for 3 weeks and saw her maybe 7 times.
Lucy was a very frail black woman of about 65 years of age. She would hold my hand and tell me stories about living in the south. She told me about being beaten. With tears rolling down her face, Lucy told me her family was murdered in the race riots of the 1960s. Her son was lynched. Lucy wasn’t an activist, she was a simple poor black woman who cleaned houses. I loved my time with her. I loved her.
The last time I saw her, she slept most of the time I was there, and I just held her hand. When I got ready to leave, she squeezed my hand and asked me to stay a few more minutes. Of course, I did. She seemed to gather her strength, and with the strongest and clearest voice I had ever heard from her, she said, “I can love you if I want to. It don’t matter, I am black, and you is white. God made us all the same color on the inside. It just don’t matter. I can love you if I want; that what God wants.” The next time I visited, Lucy had died. I sat in her empty room and cried.
For the last several nights watching the news, I thought about Lucy. Has anything changed in the last 45 years? On a surface level, perhaps, but have our hearts changed. I don’t know the answer. It just makes me so sad.
Love God and love your neighbor. God wants more from us than we are giving. God wants our hearts. Love God and love your neighbor.
Perhaps what we are being asked to do in today’s Gospel reading is to dig deep in our souls and pray that we find any prejudices we harbor there. They may not be about race, although that one is obviously alive and well. We need to root out any hate in our hearts. We must ask ourselves who we dismiss based on some deeply held bias.
We all have them. Political parties, social status, the addicted or mentally ill, homosexuals or transsexuals, and on and on. That is, step one. Then we ask God, no, we plead with God to help us root out the hate that lives in us. Even if it is non-violent and very well covered by our propriety, prejudice is hate. Whenever we dismiss a group of people as less than or unworthy because of some reason we are missing the point of the greatest commandment. Love God and love your neighbor.
Mother Theresa once said, “We only love God as much as we love the person, we love the least.”
Now, as the faithful of God, we look deeply into our hearts, and we pray. We pray for our world and for ourselves. We pray that hate, prejudice, and bigotry can be rooted out of our hearts and out of our society.
May God bless us with eyes willing to see and hearts strong enough to combat evil wherever we find it, even if it is in ourselves.
In God’s unfailing love,
Gwen
