Why love is a command

An important and timely reminder from Richard Rohr in his daily mediation today

Being Human
Published in
2 min readOct 30, 2018

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We can’t risk walking around with a negative, resentful, gossipy, critical mind, because then we won’t be in our true force field. We won’t be usable instruments for God. That’s why Jesus commanded us to love. It’s that urgent. It’s that crucial…

…If we walk around with hatred all day, morally we’re just as much killers as the one who pulls the trigger. We can’t live that way and not be destroyed from within. Yet, for some reason, many Christians have thought it acceptable to think and feel hatred, negativity, and fear. The evil and genocide of both World War I and World War II were the result of decades of negative, resentful, and paranoid thinking and feeling among even good Christian people.

Jesus tells us not to harbor hateful anger or call people names in our hearts like “fool” or “worthless person” (Matthew 5:22). If we’re walking around all day thinking, “What idiots!” we’re living out of death, not life. If that’s what we think and feel, that’s what we will be — death energy instead of life force. We cannot afford even inner disconnection from love. How we live in our hearts is our real and deepest truth.

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Being Human

Husband, father, writer, Apple geek, sports fan, pragmatic idealist. I write in order to understand.