Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

by David Lins  |  02/19/2023  |  (Being) Catholic Matters

This weekend’s First Reading (Lv 19:1-2, 17-18) instructs us to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

This is not as easy as it might appear.

I live in a townhouse (which means I have a neighbor to each side with nothing more than common walls separating our living spaces). I also have an adorable five year-old who defies physics by walking down our stairs with such force you’d swear she was an NFL offensive tackle. And even though I tell her repeatedly to walk down the stairs like a normal human being, she gets excited about life and has such joy that her little body can’t contain it. It is impossible to blame her and—in truth—I’m glad she’s a little bundle of joy rather than a quiet, depressed child.

This townhouse is in Tempe, which means I commute 33 miles to work. And sometimes, when there are several accidents, I have to switch lanes aggressively to move to a faster lane so I’m not stuck in the stationary lane and late to pick up that bundle of joy from kindergarten.

Yet, when a neighbor makes a loud noise on the other side of our common wall when I’m trying to write my next novel, that isn’t acceptable.

And when someone cuts me of in traffic—especially when I’m trying to navigate around an accident—the frustration is all over my face.

It isn’t easy when you don’t know the motivations of others. And that is important to remember. We don’t know the motivations, struggles, wounds, and battles of our fellow man. And this—along with the grace of God—is what we need to love our neighbors and our enemies as ourselves.

In the Gospel of Mathew, Jesus instructs us to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

We need to extend grace, peace, empathy, and understanding to those who disturb our peace, cut us of in traffic, question our integrity, undercut our careers, abandon us in times of need, or even hurt our families.

But why? Because we are called to “be perfect, just as our Heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mt. 5:48)