Someone to love

Simple but profound wisdom from the 16th century

Each Friday our Bishop’s Assistant emails clergy in my conference prayer concerns and updated clergy appointments, along with a meditation. It is one of the first things I read each Friday morning, because after thirty years of cultivating connections, I care about what’s happening with colleagues and churches.

This morning’s meditation was an offering from Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), the Spanish mystic.¹

Our Lord asks but two things of us: love for God, and love for our neighbor.

These are the two virtues that we must strive to obtain. If we practice them perfectly we shall be doing the will of God, and so will find the union we seek. The most certain sign that we keep these two commandments is that we have a genuine love for each other.

We may not know for certain whether we love God, but there can be no doubt about whether or not we love our neighbor.

If we fail to love our neighbor, we are deceiving ourselves if we think that we love God. But if we possess a true love of neighbor we will certainly attain to union with our Lord.

So solidly rooted in Scripture, this idea of loving God and neighbor was the way Jesus summed up, when asked, the basis of his ethic. As a Jesus follower, this must be my the foundation of my life.

One of the reasons Claudia and I were able to fashion a good marriage over the years — and with two strong-willed and self-defined individuals, that can be a challenge — is because we agreed on what really mattered. In every location we lived, we sought to learn what it means to love God by caring for those around us. In the early years we initiated a ministry with Hispanic migrant farmworkers. Knowing these hard-working, disrespected neighbors from (mostly) Texas and their children forever changed my attitude about immigration. We fostered and adopted children not primarily because we wanted a family (although that motivation was there as well), but because we saw the need around us and believed we had to respond. We aligned ourselves with those forgotten or neglected by our culture because we sincerely believed that’s where Jesus would be found. We moved half-way across the county so that Claudia could spend the last nine yeas of her life completely investing to empower families fractured by addiction, dysfunction and mental health issues.

We didn’t do this because it was easy; we did it because it was the right thing to do.

Beg God to grant you true love of others and you will be rewarded with more than you know how to desire. God will insist that you surrender your self-interests for those of your neighbor, taking upon yourself their burdens.

Do not believe that this will cost you nothing and that you will find it all done for you by God. Never forget what the love God bore for all of us cost the Son of God. To free others - his neighbors - from death, he suffered the most painful death of all, the death of the cross.

I write these words of reflection not as some sort of biography of attempts at holiness, but because without Claudia’s physical presence in my life, loving God and loving neighbor looks different to me now. I confess that many times I flew in the shadow of Claudia’s soaring efforts: she was able to make happen (and at a larger scale) what I treasured but could not execute.

There are many reasons, of course, that I miss my spouse, but perhaps the major reason is that I always felt with her that I was engaged in really important matters, even if she were the face of the effort and I was the committed partner. Together we were much more than we could have been on our own.

Like any who grieve, my life is being re-arranged. My values and my ethical understanding have not changed (if anything it has been strengthened knowing that I have a legacy to foster forward), but my perception of how that may happen has been radically altered. One of my biggest tasks is to continue to figure out who I am without her.

In the weeks before her death (we had no reason to suspect it would be so soon), she and I had talked at length about what might be the “next big thing” in our lives. We knew it would look different because of our age, life location and energy levels. We weren’t sure where it might take us geographically, although we thought we knew where we might be for the next five to seven years (Roanoke). But we were confident in two things: that we had each other for the adventure, and that it would be something that involved loving God and neighbor.

My confidence has been shaken with Claudia’s death, because it is no longer a shared adventure with another person physically present in my life, and I’m not always sure where that leaves me. But I know I can’t linger in that thinking for too long, because it drains my remaining motivation and stunts my zeal. I don’t want to lose my legacy because I am overwhelmed by loss.

Teresa of Avila’s words to me are very helpful. I don’t need to have a detailed plan, although my personality would prefer it. I don’t need hundreds of thousands of dollars, although my sense of security would be more settled. I don’t even need to change my personality, even if it were possible.

I simply need to be a good neighbor. I need to trust that whomever Love places in my life as I go about my regular, ordinary daily tasks and responsibilities, are the ones I need to love.

And somehow, in being a good neighbor, I am loving Love herself.

1. There was a time when this word “mystic” made me uncomfortable, until I discovered that my heart finds a home in this spiritual way of being. Mystics are “those who seek direct, personal experience of the divine, spiritual truth, or ultimate reality, often through contemplation, meditation, or ecstasy.” A mystic understands spiritual life as a continuing, dynamic process by which the seeker finds union with God.