Christian love is not just words. As Pope Francis reminds us, true love is made concrete in caring for God, for one’s neighbor and for oneself. In this text that was published in the yearbook 2024, Carmen Montejo invites us to discover how care goes through our daily lives and becomes a path of conversion, fraternity and justice.
Love needs concreteness
Pope Francis, in his address before praying the Angelus on February 11, told the thousands of faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square:
“Love needs concreteness, presence, encounter, donated time and space; it cannot be reduced to beautiful words, momentary selfies or hurried messages.”
He would go on to point out that Jesus’ style with those who suffer is one of “few words and concrete deeds”.
Loving and caring are inseparable
The concreteness of love is care. Loving and caring are inseparable, and Jesus spoke to us of three loves: love of God, love of neighbor and love of self. Jesus’ command is not capricious or fortuitous, because care is at the essence of who we are; it is the distinctive ethical quality of what we understand in evolution as “human.
The first sign of civilization,” anthropologist Margaret Mead told her students, “was a broken and healed femur: caring for others made us human. And the fact is that, from the moment we are born, we are biochemically “designed” for love, care and communion with others.
The challenge of self-care
Perhaps we have forgotten to emphasize the need for that healthy love of “self”; and we often relegate self-care in favor of our desire to give to God and neighbor. But no one can give what he or she does not have, for, in reality, it is love itself.
Here we have the first challenge of this conversion to love proposed by Jesus: to give time and space, in our daily life, for a little physical exercise, for leisure and conversation, and for rest..
The culture of good treatment
In order to love each other in proximity, we must understand that our life is at stake in everyday life.
Pope Francis states in Fratelli tutti (224):
“The cultivation of kindness -good treatment-, since it presupposes valuing and respect, when it becomes a culture, profoundly transfigures the lifestyle, relationships and the way of debating and confronting ideas (…) it opens paths where exasperation destroys all bridges.”
Promoting a culture of good treatment in our community, pastoral and apostolic contexts goes beyond preventing situations of mistreatment; it involves fostering empathy and effective communication, understanding and sharing needs, recognizing others, respecting their autonomy, resolving conflicts in a non-violent manner and exercising power with love and service.
If authority is not understood as love and service in our institutions, it fosters perverted asymmetrical relationships, a prelude to power, spiritual and sexual abuses.
Caring for each other in fraternity
Caring for each other in fraternity will enable us to care as a family and healing community, and to generate processes of encounter and healing, preferentially with those in situations of special vulnerability: the poor and the victims, whose cries cry out to heaven for justice and full life.
If we do not allow ourselves to be touched and transformed by the pain of the victims, if we do not strive to bring them down from the cross and repair them, our commissions, norms and protocols will only be propaganda and our protection work will be mere cosmetics, our commissions, norms and protocols will be nothing but propaganda and our protection work will be mere cosmetics..
Letting God take care of us
None of the above will be possible by resorting to our meager forces alone.
Only by welcoming in the struggles, the faces and the silences of every day, the Love of God the Father, “all-loving Love of God the Father “all-loving” with maternal entrails, who first loved usonly by recognizing ourselves in need and allowing ourselves to be cared for by our brothers and sisters, will we be able to approach the mystery of communion for the mission that He dreamed for the Church.