Great Love

On Tuesday evening I went to a clergy event with the Bishop.  This diocese holds them on a regular basis and it enables the clergy to come together with the bishop to discuss certain issues that are relevant and be brought up to date on other concerns.  The speaker, Kevin Lamorieux, was dynamic and engaging.  He made a statement that captured my pondering.  He said that his grandmother passed along a valuable piece of advice to him.  "Love everyone!"  He went on to say that there are lots of people that he likes just fine but he has yet to succeed in loving everyone and all that it implies.

I am sure that we have all been faced at one time or another with someone telling us to love people.  It is easy to command or say but sometimes much harder to put into practice.  And for the speaker on Tuesday evening to say that put an honest perspective on our relationships with others.  It is not easy to love everyone, sometimes we struggle with the very concept in our own families much less with the general public. And yet the sentiment brings strong reaction and thought.

Love everyone and then we need to put a name and face to who it is we love and then we begin to think about the short comings of the person and the time they did something wrong and we can go on and on with good and valid reasons as to why we are holding out.  Then I think about those who say I love  you with relative ease and I find a certain discomfort in the easy ability they have to say those three little words especially if they are more of an acquaintance than what I would deem a very close friend.

Love, the lyrics of one song says, is a many splendoured thing.  I am not sure that we would all describe it in the same way and yet there was something about yesterday's sentiment from a grandmother saying "Love everyone"  that calls not only to the speaker but to all of us to try to do our very best to love and in so doing create world will be a lovelier and kinder place.  It calls each of us to strive to do better by the people that we know and are in relationship with, to do better with those that we will one day meet.  It calls us to strive to be the people that we have been encouraged to become.

Love everyone, at least start with the liking and work towards becoming an even better person and one small step at a time we will succeed in being all that we can be.

Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love....The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love.

• As quoted in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (2007) by Brian Kolodiejchuk