When Our Neighbors Are Difficult to Love

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people — G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News (16 July 1910)

How do you love the cruel? The indifferent? Those who don’t see the world as it is, but rather as their pain or their blinkered vision makes them think it is?

How do you love your neighbor who behaves like an enemy? How do you love the person and hate the sin? How do you separate those two in your head?

C.S. Lewis had tremendous wisdom on this point. Writing in Mere Christianity, he said:

I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. ... I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

Now, some of us have a hard time loving ourselves, as well, or are led to believe that there is no such thing as licit, valid self-love. The Golden Rule tells us otherwise. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 22:39). Jesus called that the second greatest commandment, after love of God. And there, entangled in one commandment, is love of self and love of others. Love others? You must love yourself similarly. Love yourself? You must love others similarly.

You can’t get away from it. We are lovable — if we were not, God wouldn’t hold us in existence with His love. We are lovable — our neighbors are commanded to love us. They are lovable — God holds them in existence with His love, and commands us to love them.

The whole of the created world is meant to facilitate love, to be the medium for a constant, eternal communication and communion of love, giving and receiving. The whole thing from the beginning was set up to be that. Original sin disrupted it, but did not destroy it. But of course, a thing designed to speed life and love out to others may, when broken, become a terrible draining vaccum on us, sucking us dry and sending our life and love off into the void.

Christ restores the original connections with His life, death, and Resurrection. We, by uniting our sufferings, our lives, our joys, our sorrows, our works and our play to Him through the Mass, can make sure that all the outpouring of our life and love into the world doesn’t fall into darkness. Everything in our lives can take on a tinge of eternity. Everything and everyone whom we love can be enriched and elevated by that love if it is joined to the love of God, to God who is Love.

We see the fruits of this sort of self-offering throughout St. Faustina’s Diary. For instance:

One day Jesus told me that He would cause a chastisement to fall upon the most beautiful city in our country [probably Warsaw]. This chastisement would be that with which God had punished Sodom and Gomorrah. I saw the great wrath of God and a shudder pierced my heart. I prayed in silence. After a moment, Jesus said to me, My child, unite yourself closely to Me during the Sacrifice and offer My Blood and My Wounds to My Father in expiation for the sins of that city. Repeat this without interruption throughout the entire Holy Mass. Do this for seven days. On the seventh day I saw Jesus in a bright cloud and began to beg Him to look upon the city and upon our whole country. Jesus looked [down] graciously. When I saw the kindness of Jesus, I began to beg His blessing. Immediately Jesus said, For your sake I bless the entire country. And He made a big sign of the cross over our country. Seeing the goodness of God, a great joy filled my soul (Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, 39).

This is the secret of the saints, the source of their miraculous good works, the huge impact they had on their communities in their lives, and their ongoing ability to intercede for us from Heaven—union with Jesus Christ. That union is initiated by hearing the Word of God and receiving the grace of faith and the Sacraments. That union is sustained by the Sacraments, by reading the Scriptures and living the laws of love, by the works of mercy, by personal prayer. Even the bare minimum of the Christian life has the potential to change everything; when saints go racing beyond the minimum, propelled forward by the generosity of love, the Church and the world are forever blessed.

So love your neighbors, even the ones hardest to love. Love your neighbors who don’t love you, even those who hate you, not agreeing with their hate or giving any room in your heart for believing in their criticisms, gossip, or vindictiveness, for you are commanded to love yourself, but simply by seeing them as God sees them: as beloved children. Love your neighbors as Christ does, in union with Christ, and so help redeem yourself, them, and the world.

Chris Sparks serves as senior book editor for the Marian Fathers. He is the author of the Marian Press book How Can You Still Be Catholic? 50 Answers to a Good Question.

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We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain. He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one's duty towards humanity, but one's duty towards one's neighbour. The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. ... [W]e have to love our neighbour because he is there … . He is the sample of humanity which is actually given to us. Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an accident — G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family.”