Just Six Words

Love God and Love your neighbor. These are the two greatest commandments. In just six words, Jesus summed up all the teachings of the scriptures. In six words, Jesus summed up what he had taught and modeled during His life. Just six words give us the blueprint for a life well lived.

In 1976, I met a woman I will never forget. Her name was Lucy. I never knew her last name. I was finishing my first year in the convent. Being new to religious life, we were asked to have a volunteer ministry 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. The goal of Calvary Hospital was to help people die.  It was placing the sick into God’s arms in their heavenly home.

My task usually involved simply sitting beside the bed of one of the patients and talking with them, holding their hand, or just being silent and praying. That is where I met Lucy. Lucy was my assigned patient, and I spent several hours with her a few times a week. I only knew Lucy for three weeks and saw her seven times.

Lucy was a 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. Lucy, with tears rolling down her weathered and wrinkled face, told me of the murder of her family 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. She seemed to gather her strength. She said, “I can love you if I want to. It doesn’t matter. I’m black, and you is white. God made us all the same on the inside. It just doesn’t matter. I can love you if I want. That’s what God wants.” The next time I visited, Lucy had died.

As I prayed with these readings, I remembered Lucy’s simple wisdom, “I can love you if I want. That’s what God wants.”

Love God and love your neighbor. I think God wants more from us than we are often comfortable giving. God wants our hearts, all of our hearts. Love God and love your neighbor is a demanding command. Too often, we change Jesus’ six simple words to—“Love God, love those like me, and cause no harm to others.” 

Perhaps we are being asked in today’s Gospel to dig deeply into our souls and pray that we find any prejudices we harbor there. They may not be about race, although that one is alive and well. We must determine who we dismiss based on some deeply held judgment or bias. We all have them: political parties, social status, the addicted, the mentally ill, homosexuals or transsexuals, and so on. That is step one.

Then we ask God, no, we plead with God to help us root out the hate in us. Even if it is non-violent and well covered by our propriety, prejudice is hate. Whenever we dismiss a group of people as less than or unworthy for some reason, we miss the point of Jesus’ words. Love God and love your neighbor.

Dorothy Day once said, “We only love God as much as we love the person we love the least.” Now, there is a sobering thought!

May God bless us with eyes willing to see and hearts strong enough to combat hate wherever we find it, even if it is in ourselves. Then, we will be able to wholeheartedly embrace the command of Jesus to Love God and Love our neighbor.

In God’s Unending Love,

Gwen