Deeply Love One Another

I've been wrestling a lot in prayer with attachments to others and with relationships. And I've discovered that when it comes to loving others, there are two extremes: to be too attached to people or to be too afraid to be attached to people.

For most of my life, I lived in the first extreme. I cared far too much about what others thought about me, and I placed too much emphasis on my relationships with others and not enough on my relationship with Christ. My relationships, instead of leading me into greater holiness, detracted from my relationship with Him because I gave them a higher place in my heart than Him. There was always a certain grasping in these relationships: it seemed that no matter how much love these people showed me, I was always hungering for more, grasping for things that I didn't think they were giving me, expecting more than was reasonable from them.

But now that I've progressed a bit in the spiritual life, I find myself falling into the second extreme. Every time I feel a deep love stir in my heart for another person, I live in a state of fear that I'm falling back into that first extreme. So instead of examining this love or allowing it to grow, I try to squash it or run from it.

There's this relationship in my life right now that is extremely important to me. This person is a spiritual mentor to me, and she's teaching me so much about what it means to be a holy woman of God. She’s become such a big part of my heart that I can’t imagine my life without her in it.

And honestly? That terrifies me. I live in a state of fear that I'm too attached to her, that my love for her is unhealthy, that our relationship gets in the way of my relationship with God.

When I begin to feel this deep love for her rise up in my soul, my first instinct is to run. Squash it. Root it up out of my heart and throw it far from me. Because obviously this deep and incomprehensible love that I have for her isn't from God--it must be from my own grasping, my own brokenness, my own need that I'm grasping for her to fill.

False.

In prayer, the Lord has been opening my heart more and more to the truth that He wants me to be in this relationship. He wants me to have this deep love for her. He wants to use her love to change me. He wants to use my love for her to soften both of our hearts to His love for us. Through her spiritual motherhood, He wants to teach me more about what it means to be a daughter. And through my spiritual daughterhood, He wants to teach her more about what it means to be a mother.

“My children, I will be with you only a little while longer … I give you a new commandment: love one another.” -John 13:33-34.

This is our faith, sisters. It is Incarnational -- He could have saved us in any way, but He chose to come in the Incarnation -- to come as a human person that we could see and touch, to use a human body as the instrument of our redemption. And He chooses to come to us physically in the Eucharist, to give us His Body and Blood in order to continually sanctify us and draw us closer to Him. And just as He wants us to encounter His love in His real presence in the Eucharist, so He uses others to bring us to a deeper encounter with Him.

Faith is not a solitary journey. It's not meant to be. Our God is a communion of persons -- three Persons, one God. And just as the Trinity exists in community, so are we meant to exist in community. We can't go it alone. We need others: friends, spouses, spiritual mentors, teachers, siblings, parents. And when I live my life in fear of being too attached to others, when I try to squash the love that stirs deep down in my soul for others, I miss out on the way that He wants to move through those relationships to transform my life.

Ultimately He is the only one that can fulfill all those desires that we feel so deeply, but that doesn't mean that others aren’t part of His plan to do that. He works through others to fulfill those desires.

And this relationship in my life? The love that stirs so deeply in my heart, a love that seems to reach into the abyss of my soul, a love that scares me and yet brings me an incredible amount of peace and joy--this is His love. I’m not capable of loving that deeply and selflessly on my own. This love flows from my love for Him. Because I love Him with all my heart, soul, strength, and mind, I am free to truly love this beautiful and incredible spiritual mother of mine as myself. "Love of neighbor is inseparable from love for God" (CCC 1878).

And the love that this spiritual mother has for me flows from His love. When she loves me, she is truly and freely loving me, but only because it is His love being poured out into her soul. He could fulfill my desires in any way, but He chooses to do it in an incarnational way--to use her love to show me how deeply He wants to fulfill my desires. When I think of this deep love that I have for so many in my life, I’m reminded of the quote from Les Mis: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” Through my relationships, I see the love that God has for me.

Sisters, there is nothing wrong with desiring relationship. There is nothing wrong with desiring to be loved, affirmed, wanted, cherished by others. There's nothing wrong with being attached to others--as long as we're attached first and foremost to Him. When we set our sight on Christ and our focus on our relationship with Him, others are going to come into our lives. He's going to bring other people into our places of need, and He's going to use their love to change us and to show us His own love for us. And what a beautiful gift. What a blessing to know that we do not walk this journey alone, to know that a love that stirs so deeply in our souls is a participation in the love of Christ.

Be not afraid to love deeply, to seek relationship. Just remember that He loves us first and that He loves us most. When we allow this truth to be the penetrating force and guiding principle, we are truly free to love deeply and to love selflessly.

So here's to deeply loving others.

Rations

I don't know about you, but I ration things. I ration my time, my energy, my money, my friendship, my chocolate (I'm a selfish hoarder when it comes to sweets). I make choices every day about how I want to spend these things. How much time can I afford to spend listening to that friend who really needs me? How much energy should I devote to this paper? How many moments should I spend sitting with the Lord in silence when I have a million other things demanding my attention? How much money should I throw in that collection box and how much should I spend going out with friends?

A couple months ago, during a Steubenville Youth Conference Holy Hour that I was working, the priest said something that struck me.

God's love does not have rations.

STOP. Rewind. Repeat.

God's love does not have rations.

There's never a day when He doesn't stop loving us. There's never a day that He says "that's enough, this is too much, I've given too much love to her, I'm gonna stop."

Isn't this our greatest fear? That if we give people the chance to see us for who we really are, they're going to realize that we're too much for them? Or that people will only see us as another thing to ration their time and love to and not someone worth giving it all for?

I don't think it's too presumptuous of me to assume that you have felt this way one time or another.

I know I have.

During those moments of adoration that night, the Lord spoke a truth to my heart that I know I'll have to continue to learn over and over again for as long as it takes for me to truly understand:

His love for me will never run out.

He doesn't have a limited amount to give to me. He doesn't have to ration His love, His energy, His patience, His forgiveness, His time. And what's more, He doesn't want to, no matter how unfaithful I might be.

In my limited ability to love, so often I have the mentality that if someone isn't returning the rations that I've given them with equal rations of their own, I don't want to ration anything else out. Well, she clearly doesn't love me as much as I love her, so I'm going to stop wasting my love and energy on her.

Can you imagine what life would be if our God had that mentality?

Thankfully, He doesn't.

No matter how little patience I have for that son or daughter of His that I just can't seem to love the way I should, His patience for how slow I am at figuring out how quickly everything will fall apart when I try to remain in control will never run out.

No matter how little energy or motivation I have for giving my all to the things that I've committed to (*cough cough* schoolwork, work, ministry, my family *cough cough*), His motivation for moving my heart to greater love for Him and His Church will never run out.

No matter how unwilling I am to forgive that person who still seems to have no awareness of the ways they deeply hurt me, His willingness to forgive the sins I commit that hurt Him and His children will never run out.

No matter how quickly I am ready to cut down on the time that I give to Him in prayer each day, the time that He spends pursuing my heart and showing me what I mean to him will never run out.

No matter how little love I show Him in the things that I do and the people that I meet, His love for me, love that took Him to a gruesome and painful death on a cross for the sake of my soul, will never run out.

Dear ones, if we rely on our own strength, it's not surprising that we need to ration. On our own, we don't have enough. But when we turn to Him, He pours out an abundance.

So the next time you feel tempted to ration something, turn to Him. Ask Him to multiply whatever it is you feel that you don't have enough of. The God of Abundance wants to give. Let Him.

What are you rationing in your life right now? What do you need an abundance of?

The Beauty of Goodbyes

Goodbyes are hard.

Tonight, I had to say goodbye to a priest who has become a father to me. This is the fourth time that I’ve had to say goodbye to him in the last year, but instead of getting easier, I find that each goodbye does more damage to my heart than the last. This goodbye is made especially hard by the fact that this time, there is no time frame for when I will see him again in this life. I don’t know when I will see him again, and so this goodbye has a finality to it that the others have not.

In two months, I have to say goodbye to another man who has become a friend, confidant, and brother to me. Like his brother priest, this man has been reassigned.

As I sat on a set of steps outdoors and wept after my goodbye tonight (realizing that another would be coming much sooner than I’d like), crying out in anguish to the Father in Heaven who sees each tear and feels my heartbreak, something occurred to me.

Goodbyes are hard for a reason, sisters.

Goodbyes remind us that we were not made for this world.

So often I forget how temporary this world is. I allow myself to become satisfied with the material, with the perishable, rather than holding out for the eternal. And that, sisters, is when goodbyes become difficult.

In this world, all things must pass, including our relationships. Whether it’s the move of a best friend, the death of a spouse, the growing up of a child, the ending of a friendship, or the reassignment of a priest or religious we have grown close to, goodbyes will come, and they will hurt.

So let them, sisters. Let them hurt. Let them reawaken the ache in your souls for the eternal. For when we come to heaven’s shore, we will be reunited with all those that we loved and lost, and we will never, ever have to say goodbye again.

So I’m going to lean into this pain, sisters. I’m going to embrace these goodbyes, as hard as they are. I’m going to rejoice in the tears. I’m going to turn to our loving Father with an ache in my soul that only He can fill. I pray that the next time you have a tough goodbye, you do the same.

This post appeared first on Blessed is She.

Disclaimer: This is a post I wrote a couple months ago that was featured on the Blessed is She blog!