The "All-ness" of Love
A gentle tug on my shirt sleeve jilts me from my thoughts. As if coming out of a dense fog, I blink hard and slow. Shivers run through my body as I’m transported from whatever thought held me captive back into the present. Standing at the kitchen counter, I look down to see two big, blue eyes staring up at me.
He looks so much like his daddy, I muse as a slight frown forms between my son’s eyebrows. He pulls my arm with greater urgency, “Mom!”
His tone tells me that he has said my name before. With a fresh wave of guilt, I realize I have no idea how long my four-year-old had been trying to get my attention. My mind a sea of rumination, I had missed his soft skin touching mine. My body was in the room, but for all intents and purposes, I was not.
Presence requires much more than physical nearness. How often can be within proximity of one another—touching, even—without being connected in the ways our souls crave. My son’s blue eyes told the story. Even without space between us, he knew I was not there with him. He ached for more. While I wish this incident were isolated, my mind, body, and spirit are too often disjointed. And it is hard to love when we do not show up fully.
Jesus did not mince words on this point. When the religious leaders pressed him to name the greatest commandment (looking not for answers but for reasons take him down), his response came easily: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind . . . love your neighbor as yourself.”[1] The Passion Translation is even more dynamic:
‘Love the Lord your God with every passion of your heart, with all the energy of your being, and with every thought that is within you.’ This is the great and supreme commandment. And the second is like it in importance: ‘You must love your friend in the same way you love yourself.’[2]
Every passion. All the energy. Every thought. Jesus did not leave room for us to second-guess what love requires. Love demands all. Mother Theresa said it this way: “Love to be real, it must cost—it must hurt—it must empty us of self.” My own mother had her own take, reminding me and my siblings often to “turn our arrows outward” when selfishness ensued. Both mothers had it right.
Love is not a consumption but an outpouring. It is an all-ness that synthesizes mind, body, and spirit and offers every fiber of who we are—first to God, and then to each other.
And while love “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres,” it isn’t meant to be cumbersome.[3] Jesus’ asks for our all not to induce guilt or wear us down, but rather to lead us to belonging, so that we can taste eternity on our tongues. In giving the fullness of ourselves to God and to each other, we get out of our own way to experience the communion for which we were intended, to enjoy the delicate dance of the kingdom “on earth, as it is in heaven.”[4]
This kind of love is radical, yes, but it begins right where we are—in the subtle, small moments in our living rooms and kitchens, in our pace of life and our paying attention, in our eagerness to hear before being heard and to allow questions to be asked. In the ways we are easily interrupted by tiny fingers and quick to kneel and look into blue eyes longing for connection.