A Quote by Basil Hume

How wonderful it would be if the love of God was our priority and the love of neighbour flowed from that. — © Basil Hume
How wonderful it would be if the love of God was our priority and the love of neighbour flowed from that.
It is not enough for us to say: I love God, but I do not love my neighbour. St. John says you are a liar if you say you love God and you don't love your neighbour. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbour whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live.
For us Christians, love of neighbour springs from love of God; and it is its most limpid expression. Here one tries to love one's neighbour, but also to allow oneself to be loved by one's neighbour. These two attitudes go together, one cannot be exercised without the other. Printed on the letterhead of the Missionaries of Charity are these words of Jesus: "as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me". Loving God in our brethren and loving our brethren in God.
Love of our neighbour, then, has just the same respect to, is no more distant from, self-love, than hatred of our neighbour, or than love or hatred of anything else.
Our responsibility is to love God and to love our neighbour which is what Jesus taught and it's also what Judaism taught - and that would make sense because Jesus was Jewish.
How could we claim to love our neighbour while at the same time praying for God to destroy them?
But I was not obeying the first and greatest commandment - to love God first - nor is it clear that I was obeying the second - to love my neighbour. Hating the oppressors of my neighbour isn't perhaps quite what Christ had in mind.
Mysterious as it may be, there is something wonderful at the heart of our existence, and it is about nothing other than love; love for God, love for one another, love for creation, love for life itself.
By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbour actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbour, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.
May we not say, that true zeal is not mostly charitable, but wholly so? That is, if we take charity in St. Paul's sense, for love; the love of God and our neighbour. For it is a certain truth, (although little understood in the world), that Christian zeal is all love. It is nothing else.
Love. How do we define this word? We love our family. We love food. We love the weather. We love our shoes. Love that music. Love someone's work. Love a movie. Love a celebrity. Love that time in life. Love love love!
When you open the door which you shut in order to pray to God, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbour whom you shall love. Wonderful!
A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat "Do as you would be done by" till I am black in the fact, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God.
So many of our love languages are based on how our parents loved us or didn't love us. What our parents gave us either has become our priority or what they didn't give us has become our priority.
There is a religious principle: Love thy neighbour as thyself. But it's also an economic asset. If you've got a neighbour, you've got help, and this implies another limit. If you want to have neighbours, you can't have a limitless growth economy. You have to prefer to have a neighbour rather than to own your neighbour farm.
If we don't love ourselves, we would not love others. When someone tell you to love others first, and to love others more than ourselves; it is impossible. If you can't love yourselves, you can't love anybody else. Therefore we must gather up our great power so that we know in what ways we are good, what special abilities we have, what wisdom, what kind of talent we have, and how big our love is. When we can recognize our virtues, we can learn how to love others.
Then, certainly, to be a Christian is to love God above all, and our neighbour as ourselves.
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