“I love you”

One Sunday in a mass specially celebrated for married couples a priest preached about marriage. At the end of the service he was giving out small wooden crosses to each married couple. He said, “Place this cross in the room in which you quarrel the most and you will be reminded of Jesus’ new commandment “love one another” and you won’t argue much.” One woman came up and said: “Father, you had better give me ten crosses.”
St. Bernard of Clairvaux said that whenever he looked at the crucifix the wounds of Christ seemed like lips speaking to him saying, “I love you.”
When Mother Teresa accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1979, part of her acceptance speech went like this:
“It is not enough for us to say: ‘I love God, but I do not love my neighbor.’ How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? And so this is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt.”
In a letter to the people of Albania Mother Teresa gives the key to love one another. The key to loving others is prayer. She wrote,
“To be able to love one another, we must pray much, for prayer gives a clean heart and a clean heart can see God in our neighbor. If now we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten how to see God in one another. If each person saw God in his neighbor, do you think we would need guns and bombs?”
Thinking like this means thinking in a new way, putting on a new mind, letting our brains be washed with the Gospel of Jesus. And as Mother Teresa said, it is through prayer that we will receive the grace to see others with this new mind of Jesus.
When we put on this new mind, the mind of Jesus, then his kingdom is coming in our world. Then the wounds of Christ are like lips speaking to us “I love you.”