Love is a popular word within
Christianity, in Scripture. Loving, not only ourselves, but also our neighbour
and God is a ‘requirement’. How can we show our love for God, if we don’t even
love our neighbour, our friend, our family? This has to be achieved first,
before attempting to reach the higher stage of love, i.e. of loving our enemy.
This latter achievement is not an easy task. Fr Sophrony Sakharov speaks about
the issue of loving our neighbour:
‘To love our neighbour as
ourselves, to live according to the commandment of Christ, will lead us to the
garden of Gethsemane, where Christ prayed for the whole world. ‘Love thy
neighbour as thyself’. It was given to me to understand this commandment in the
form of a gigantic tree, of cosmic dimensions, whose root is Adam. Myself, I am
only a little leaf on a branch of this tree. But this tree is not foreign to
me; it is the basis of my being. I belong to it. To pray for the whole world is
to pray for this tree in its totality, with its milliards of leaves. To follow
Christ means to open oneself to the same consciousness as Christ, who bears in
Himself the whole of humanity, the totality of the tree, without excluding a
single leaf. If we acquire this consciousness, we will pray for all as for
ourselves. . . In Christ, our consciousness expands, our life becomes
unlimited. In the commandment ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, we must
understand the words ‘as thyself’ in this way: every man, the ‘whole Adam’, is
my being.’ [1]
[1]
Sakharov, Archimandrite Sophrony, Words
of Life, (Essex, Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 2010), pp.
21-22.
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