“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40). I believe that these two great commandments that Jesus outlines are not two separate commandments but that the second is a practical application of the first. We will not have the capacity to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and mind right off the bat. Maybe we start off small and try to love our neighbors with even a small part of our heart, or a little bit of our soul, or a fraction of our mind. While we are at it, maybe we can try to practice this whole love thing out on ourselves as well. And we will struggle and stumble and fall and fail, almost always, and at first we might usually make things worse, and surprise ourselves by how quickly our love can slip out of our grasp, displaced by anger or fear or selfishness or pride, or morph into jealousy and hatred and contempt. As we keep at it, however, our capacity to love ourselves, our neighbors, and the Lord will increase. We will discover through the divine influence of the pure love of Christ that when we love our neighbor as ourselves, we are only loving the Lord our God, for God is love, and He is inside each of us, and inside each of our neighbors. To love God with all of our heart is to have the reverence and awe and love for our neighbors, recognizing the divine worth in each of them, becoming endlessly and irrecoverably fascinated by them, wanting to give up all that we have and are to ensure their happiness. To love God with all of our souls is to recognize that same divine worth within ourselves and to look after and care for and encourage ourselves in our quest to love more fully and openly and honestly. To love God with all of our minds is to have the veil ripped away and to see through Heaven’s eye that there is no distinction between the love we feel for ourselves, for our neighbors, or for our God, and that we may become one in heart, soul, and mind with perfect unity, willingly giving up our own lives and having our wills to be swallowed up in the love that binds all of us together. I know that as we practice loving ourselves and our neighbors, we will get better and better at loving the Lord our God, and better at finding Him inside the hearts, souls and minds of everyone we meet.
