Dilemmas of Love

Dilemmas of Love
Easter 6; John 15:9-17
So you said to your friends in farewell:
“This is my commandment,
that you love one another
as I have loved you.”
No need of ten commandments:
this one is challenge enough.
No doubt it would change the world,
but how do we live up to it?

How do we love as you loved,
you who are love embodied,
we who are bodies muddling love?
We trail our tattered loving
through the mud of the mundane,
or risk it burnt to ashes
in the wanton fires of passion.

How do we do Christ-like love?
Is there a manual of instruction
in the words of your teaching,
or your living and your dying?
Is humility a sign and lesson of love?
Being like a child, or a servant
shames human pride, and our egos 
that grasp at being special and affirmed.
The key to your human existence
was being here with us and for us,
advocate for the marginalized,
host and healer for the down and out.

Even you were not completely impervious
to the stain of ethnic and gender bias,
or the burden of compassion fatigue.
Exhaustion and prejudice
marred your first reaction
to the Syrophoenician woman.
That was a lesson in loving,
not because you were perfect, 
but because you struggled
to put aside your intolerant response
until at last you were there for this other,
recognized her desperate mother love,
and you listened, respected and enabled her,
saying she spoke to you a word of wisdom,
and was source of her own daughter’s healing.

In your last teaching, you longed
to open us to love and the Spirit,
knowing your time was coming
to live out your loving by dying,
the ultimate walking of the talk.
How can we aspire to such commitment,
or is aspiring a misconception?
Perhaps love does not come from comparing,
from instruction or even commandment.
Does it flow from awareness of being,
a connection with you and creation?
Can it be that the source of true loving
is response to the God of love incarnate,
transformation by mutual presence,
and in that moment, joy shared and complete?
	Barbara Messner 2/05/2024