soul composting

“‘You must love the Most High God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.’” - Matthew 22:37-39

Whenever I talk about this Scripture with others, I love to tell them how loving G*d is so important it’s the only thing besides prophetic passages that’s in the Bible twice. “So important,” I tell people, “we’re reminded twice.” (Deuteronomy 6:5, known as the Shema, the most important teaching in the Torah.)

Sitting in Mass this morning listening to this Gospel reading, I started thinking of one of my favorite nuns, an IHM in Monroe. She and I happened to connect with each other in that way that seems random but as time plays out you see how very important it was for the worlds to collide at that time.  During our encounter with one another, she said to me, “Regina, you just have to know… God loves us so damn much.” She then expressed her dismay at having used what some would consider “coarse language” but told me she just didn’t know any other way to say it. Her time as a sister, as a teacher, as a member of the community at the Motherhouse had taught her that nothing mattered so much as G*d’s love for us and our response to that love.

Today’s text echoes that sentiment. In fitness, they talk about “core-building”. When you strengthen your core, you provide stability for the rest of your body. The Shema calls us to love G*d with all our “might”. That “might” is our core, to love G*d with everything we have, in the very depths of our being. When a love of G*d is at our core, it provides that strength and stability from which we are able to live the lives we are meant to live, lives in which we don’t just show people G*d’s love, we ARE G*d’s love to the world. When you love God with all of your might, that love inhabits your DNA and you realize that G*d loves you so damn much that you can’t do anything else but love others, too.