A Surprise
A couple of weeks ago I was at a wedding (you may have read my homily from the mass in an earlier post). At the reception I found myself chatting with a young woman. (I hope she won’t mind my relating a little of our conversation.) I asked her what she did for a living. “I work at a shelter for homeless women” she answered. Thinking immediately of my friends, the Missionaries of Charity, who run such a shelter here in Newark, I enthused, “What a beautiful ministry! How do you like it?” Her face gave

As I was wondering what that was all about she added as a clarification to this priest from New Jersey, “Well, you see, I’m an atheist.” I wonder I my face gave me away at that point? What I said to myself was, “Well, no wonder you find it depressing to work with difficult, miserable, victimized, suffering people!” But I didn’t say that. It turned out that she had done graduate work in ethics and moral philosophy, but those studies didn’t seem to be sustaining her in her work with the homeless women. So we moved away quickly from the topic of work and into a delightful conversation about the development of conscience and moral growth in adolescents.
Okay, put that little encounter on hold for a minute while I tell you what made me think of her today.
The Two Great Commandments
It happened when I was studying the following Gospel passage, the one

and one of [the Pharisees], a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ (Mt 22:35-40)
As many of you may know, scholars tell us that Jesus’ summary of the Law is not original with him. It’s a combination of a couple of Old Testament passages. In fact, there’s a Jewish document called The Testimonies of the Twelve Patriarchs dating from just before Christ, in which this combining of the two great commandments is found stated in much the same words as Jesus used.
So what was so special about Jesus’ response? It seems that in the similar passages in Jewish sources the two commandments, love of God and love of neighbor, stand side by side, serving together as a convenient summary of the entire Law. But we know from reading the gospels that Jesus understands the two commandments not as simply parallel to one another but as interlocking in a new and radical way: You cannot have one love if you don’t have the other love as well.
For example, if you don’t love your neighbor, Jesus taught, you can’t say you love God. “I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink.” Jesus continually identifies with the poor, the outcast, the oppressed. You love the divine Lord by loving his poor. There’s no such thing in Christianity as "I love God deeply, I just don't love people."
On the other hand our Savior teaches that if you don't love God your love of neighbor will be just
Mother Teresa's Secret
I frequently have the privilege of watching the Missionaries of Charity interact with poor people. And as a priest who says mass for them at least once a week I also know their secret: their

For her Missionaries of Charity, love of God and love of neighbor are indeed intertwined in a single beautiful unity. The sisters live out the intimate connection between the two inseparable laws of love just as Christ laid it out for us in the gospel.
St. Benedict's Approach
Saint Benedict, writing in the 500’s, showed the same insight into the connection between love of God and love of neighbor. In Chapter 53 of his Rule for Monks, “The Reception of Guests,” he wrote:
All

Thus our famous Benedictine tradition of hospitality is founded on those two intertwined laws in today's gospel: love of God and love of neighbor. I can only hope that the two will always work that way in the various aspects of my own life -- as a community member, a teacher, priest and so forth.
I pray for the Missionaries of Charity and for my young atheist friend that they all may continue in their own way to minister generously to God’s poor people.
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