Beyond the Patio

A Prescription for the Fullness of Life
John 13:31-35

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:34-35

One could say that the whole Gospel of Christ is a Gospel of Love. Love is at the heart of the Christian faith. Love is the answer to the world’s needs. It is true that to be commanded to love is like being commanded to march ten miles when we have a broken leg, or to get well when we are sick but as Joseph Donders commented on the command to love in John’s Gospel, the word “command” is to be understood to be more like a prescription than an order, more like a recipe than a demand.

It would be like a doctor writing a prescription and saying “take this medication in order to be healthy”, or a cook who says this ingredient is necessary for a good soup. It could even mean something like “it is necessary to have peas in pea soup – it is not pea soup without peas”. So Jesus says to his disciples that love is necessary for a truly human life. The Christian community is not a Christian community without love. That’s how important it is. That is why we never tire of speaking of it.

( Joseph G. Donders Praying and Preaching the Sunday Gospel Orbis Books NY 1989 p.116)

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In the Gospel today Jesus says that his followers should love one another just as he has love them. It is so important to have our lives centered in a community of love, a community where we know we are loved by God and by others. This is where we share our lives with others at the deepest level, that we know each others joys and sorrows, that we are in face “at one” with others.

Jesus knew that a community of love was so important for our whole well being as humans beings. Without it we can fall apart.

I was struck with this insight a number of  years ago when reading an article on the book on Elizabeth Wurtzel’s  book, The Bitch Rules, kind of a survival manual for women. In the article it was pointed out that she seems to have had a life of alienation. She fought continually with her mother. She was estranged from her father. She was hooked on all kinds of drugs and refers to herself as a therapy junkie. One of her other books is Prozac Nation which they made a movie of shows that her life was somewhat of an expression of what life has become for many people in our society: It has been unhappy, empty and preoccupied with finding an answer to their barren lives in drugs, medication, or therapy.

There is one part in the article that almost goes unnoticed but is quite telling:

“The ‘sense of community’ with her Harvard friends buoyed her up during her twenties….but soon they began to go their separate ways and she turned to drugs.”

She became so turned in on herself that even the friends that she had didn’t matter to her. Wurtzel tells a story of her best friend who was on the way to her birthday party had an accident in which her face was sliced up and she nearly lost an eye. She says, “I never even called her in the hospital to say, “How are you?” All she was thinking about was her next fix.

(based on an article in National Post by Cassandra Jardine May 17 , 2000)

 It is so true of many people today needing to know that they are loved and cared for by others. When people cry out that nobody loves them they feel that their life is worthless. Most of the social problems that we have in our society is related to that kind of feeling. When I think of the proliferation of the incidents of violence and shootings that have occurred in our schools in recent years, I wonder how many are related to the lack of love in the perpetrator’s lives. Maybe there has been love but they didn’t feel loved. Maybe they confused their hunger for love with a desire for power and control. “Ah!” you might say, “The problems in our society are really due to psychological disorders or even neurological disorders that weren’t recognized and treated in time”, I agree, but even the treatment of these disorders have to include an exceptional amount of love for them to be successful.

When a man, who had left the community of faith and became an atheist, returned to the Church, he was greeted by his Pastor with the words, “So, you have finally seen the truth.” The man replied, “No, but I have seen the lies of a world without love.”

Yes Love is the prescription the fullness of life. 

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So it is not only important for us as followers of Christ to know that love and experience it in the Christian community.  It is important for the world and to take that sense of love with us wherever we go and wherever our influence may lie. We pass on that love that we have experienced to all who we meet.

Sometimes that kind of love demands a certain about of vulnerability.  

My Daughter just wrote of an incident in her life that demanded strength to perform a compassionate act for another but also her realizing that it also required a certain amount of vulnerability on her part. It now appears in Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Power of Positive:

It was Thanksgiving weekend and we as a family were all gathering at my daughter Mary Anne and her husband’s place for thanksgiving dinner.  Mary Anne said she would be a little late around 7 pm  because she had to close the store that she managed at the Mall.  The time we expected her home came and went with no Mary Anne arriving. We wondered what had happened.  Where was she? Telephone call to the store gave us no answer,  She wasn’t there.

We found out later that when she was taking out the garbage after closing the store, she met a young man who was quite distressed because he missed his bus and he was in danger of losing his curfew and bed at the Salvation Army. What was she to do? Would she offer him a ride which would get him to where he had to go on time and consequently be late for her own family supper and the fellowship of love that we all shared as a family? She struggled with the dangers of giving this stranger as ride. She might be mugged or raped or whatever. She faced how vulnerable she was in this situation.

She saw his desperation and as she said afterwards, “more importantly I saw a person”. She took him and got him to the Salvation Army before his curfew.  As they chatted along the way, he found out that she was missing her thanksgiving dinner and he started to cry.  Mary Anne wasn’t worried about that.  Her dinner would be still there and her family would be still waiting for her with welcomed arms when she finally did get home.  It was more important that he had a bed for the night. She figured that if she was in the same situation as he was, she would want someone to help her.

She finally arrived home.  At our thanksgiving family gatherings we all go around the table asking each other what were some of the things that we have to be thankful for in the past year. Our gathering was made much more beautiful by Mary Anne sharing this story. She told us that she didn’t recommend giving every stranger a ride but in this circumstance she found the strength to allow herself to be vulnerable  and thus made an important human connection that changed her life and hopefully changed the other person’s life. We all agreed that it was definitely something to be thankful for.

(The whole story as Mary Anne tells it ( somewhat different and more personal than her Dad’s version written here) can be found in The Power of the Positive, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Amy Newmark, Soul Publishing 2012, p. 192.)

It is difficult in this world to express this kind of love, but in every act how simple it might be, we experience the fullness of life. Robin Sharma wrote a book Who Will Cry When You Die? In it he talks how important simple acts of kindness are in our fulfillment and well being.

All too often, we believe that in order to live a truly fulfilling life we must achieve some great act or grand feat that will put us on the front covers of magazines and newspaper. Nothing could be further from the truth. A meaningful life is made up of a series of daily acts of decency and kindness, which ironically, add up to something truly great over the course of a lifetime. Everyone who enters your life has a lesson to teach and a story to tell. Every person you pass during the moments that make up your days represents an opportunity to show a little more of the compassion and courtesy that define your humanity. Why not start being more of the person you truly are during your days and doing what you can to enrich the world around you? In my mind, if you make even one person smile during your day or brighten the mood of even one stranger, your day has been a worthwhile one.

( Who Will Cry When You Die; life lessons from the monk who sold his Ferrari, by Robin Sharma, Harper Collins, Toronto, 1999 p. 4-5)

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Yes When we hear Jesus’ command to love in John’s Gospel, let us understand it to be more like the giving of a prescription to the fullness of human life.

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