Love is the greatest risk of all. No other risk we take renders us more vulnerable. Yet no other risk we take gives our lives more meaning. And so we risk love; with family again and again. We risk love again and again with friends and with neighbors we meet here and there in the course of our day. Sometimes, we take the risk to love a stranger. We open our hearts to a person we do not know. We decide to love them as our neighbor with all our heart, soul, and mind.
We can marvel at and be humbled by persons in the healing profession; people who in the normal routine of their day love someone who is a stranger to them. Nurses, doctors, clinic workers and others routinely receive strangers as neighbors in need and tend to their ailments, mend their wounds, alleviate their suffering. They have always placed themselves at risk by doing so; from Anastasia of Sirmium in the 4th century to Florence Nightingale in the 19th. So too Fatu Kekula, a 22 year old Liberian woman who nursed Ebola victims back to health, Doctor Stella Adadevoh whose early and tireless response kept the disease from spreading throughout Nigeria, also Dallas nurse Nina Pham, and the many members of Doctors Without Borders who have been doing the same, in West Africa especially.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez reminds us: “Think of love as a state of grace; not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.” (Love in the Time of Cholera)
Prayer: For the grace to love with all our heart, soul, and mind each and every neighbor.
Question: How big is my neighborhood and my love for everyone in it?
October 26, 2014 Gospel Matthew 22:32-40 Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time