When we hear Jesus's commandment to love God and our neighbour, we can subtly mishear them. He does not draw on any new text but refers back to the book of Deuteronomy. What we tend to hear is that we need to love God with all our strength, all our mind, all our soul and all our heart and to love ourselves as our neighbour. This way of listening to God puts all the emphasis on our own efforts and abilities. Yet we discover in our prayer that God gently reorders our priorities. This lets us notice that our initial entry into prayer observes what we can see and how we feel about these observations. It helps us become aware of what we are thinking and how it directly affects our lives. Yet as spend time in prayer it is almost as if our thoughts are shed and we are drawn to a deeper appreciation of what nourishes us. This quietening of our minds and hearts helps us to enter a place where we can encounter God in a silent place. This way of being present can appear timeless. It is from this timeless place that we can be renewed and discover what truly nourishes us. This allows us to clarify our thinking and our actions.
Thus we start to see how the commandments are actually written and called to be lived. We are called to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and all our strength and love our neighbour as ourselves. This gentle reordering shapes our priorities to a rule of life that is simple and liveable. This is not about working harder or longer but allowing us to cooperate with God's way of being present in our lives.
This is important to how we structure our days. We are called to encounter God wholly as ourselves. Our holiness is not something that is added on but emerges from the inside out. This way of being present then helps us to look at the context in which we are called to live and how our lives make a difference to others through our actions. This allows our prayer to become truly incarnate by being aware of the environment in which we live and acting in a way that embodies what our hearts desire in union with God and each other.
