Recognize the merits of our neighbour

All too often in my experience we tend to home in on the negatives of our neighbor, those things that are different from our way of thinking or doing.  In fact I find myself overlooking the positive contributions and talents each one of us has.

God’s love for us is really always there, if we would only see it in all the people that we come into contact with in each present moment and if we would only see it in everything that happens to us!

All must be loved in the same way, but not in the same manner! As God loves us with the same love, that love is very individual.

Recently I read the following reflection:

"The strength and originality of Christianity lies in the bringing together of the love of God and the love of man. Christianity will never be destroyed as long as there are still people who firmly believe this and witness it with their lives. It is like the salt of the earth".

Moreover, if Christians are not like this, they are like salt without taste, fit only to be thrown away. "Who does not love the brother, that he can see, cannot love God, whom he has never seen," says St. John.

We can give the name love to a variety of things, but true love, the love which God has given to us, and which he recognises as the only authentic love, is indivisible, completely one. If love is real, it goes out to everyone and everything, to God and to man, with an infinite number of expressions, which are substantially the same. If our love is not for everyone it means, that at least for that moment, God's love is not present in our souls.

Conversely, love for man assumes love for God. St John's letter continues, "We can be sure that we love God's children if we love God himself and do what he has commanded us." It is a single reality. St. John is however definitely insisting that those who say they love God should prove it, by loving their brothers in a practical way. "Anyone who says, 'I love God', and hates his brother, is a liar and "who hates his brother, is a murderer."

"Hatred" is a strong word. Perhaps in our daily life the danger is not so much that our love is killed by hatred, but rather that it is stifled by our daily affairs, worries, and routine, or that it becomes frail and withered like a plant without water. Reminding ourselves every day of the words of St. John could prove to be the life-giving water which produces new buds.

In fact, every time that we start again to love our neighbour, it is as if we were taking the gospel seriously for the first time. "We have passed out of death and into life", in the words of St. John. We feel the fullness of life, and union with God, entering us once again.

This is, after all, something unexpected, for love means giving, giving oneself, and in some way depriving ourselves of something for another person. But every time that we give ourselves out of love, we possess love, and every time that we deny ourselves a little for someone else, and it seems that we have lost something, we have in fact, gained, because love has grown in us. Love is our true personality.

We could ask ourselves, "Who, then, is my neighbour?", and Jesus might answer, as he did when a doctor of the law asked him about his "neighbour", with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Certainly, in this reading from St. John, "brother" means first and foremost another Christian, someone with the same faith. It reminds us what a glorious discovery it was for the first Christians, and what an important reality, which seems to us at times a word without meaning.

In one of St. Peter's letters, he uses the word "brotherhood" twice, when referring to the Christian community, and in many New Testament writings the bond between Christians is called "philadelphia", or brotherly love. Until that time these two words were used only for blood relations, and this fact alone tells us how much the members of the primitive church felt themselves to be a united family. It depends on us to make it like that once again.

Another thing that is stressed in this Word of Life is to love the brother "that we can see". This means in a particular way the person right before us, the person we pass our day with, the person with whom we work, the person we live with, or indeed any person who passes us by, even for a fleeting instant, but who nevertheless is near, and before our eyes. If I do not love that person, just as he or she is, with his or her gifts or defects, I cannot love God who I do not see. This thought alone should lead us to continually convert ourselves and lead us to a committal which can continually renew our lives, far more than any individualistic ascetical practice.

The stress laid on the "brother" close at hand, or the "brother" member of the same church, does not mean that we should lose that universal vision which Paul VI summed up in his now famous phrase, "every man is my brother". If we ask ourselves how our love for all men should be, the answer is that the love of God, brought down into a human heart, is Jesus' love. We have our yardstick in what he said, "... as I have loved you".

 For this reason "brother" for us also means any stranger, with whom we wish to overcome any racial separation or discrimination. Our enemy is, at least in intention, our brother. If I have true love in me, my first desire, even before self-defence, is to be reconciled with him, and to win him back as a brother.

Our dearest brothers are those whom Jesus loved the most-the poor, the needy, the oppressed, the old, children, orphans, the sick, the hungry, sinners, those who have lost their faith, and those who have lost all hope.

Both people in the singular, and peoples, are our brothers. If we have love in us, no problem, be it religious, spiritual, social, economical, or cultural, is alien to us.

It has been said that men can be an obstacle for those who wish to remain united to God. If, however, we remain in love, the opposite happens: every brother that we meet can become a door through which we go to meet God.