As one is and ought to be

In our relation with others, it's important that we know how to treat each one personally as he is and also as he ought to be.

This is a basic demand of charity.

This will involve some tension, of course, since we have to accept everyone as he is yet also knowing what needs in him to be improved, purified, corrected, etc. But we would know how to deal with that tension if we simply follow God's commandments.

And what are these commandments? Mainly two: loving God with all our might and strength, and loving others as ourselves. The former would give us the objective criteria of loving, and the latter applies the first to all of us.

Both commandments will obviously entail a lifetime process, with stages of development, with ups and downs, wins and losses that we need to handle properly. The important thing to remember is that whatever the situation, we should just move on, always relying on God's grace, his wisdom and power, as well as our unremitting efforts.

But loving God should be the first thing to be done, since he is the source of everything, of whatever is true, good, fair, beautiful and proper to us. When we love God first, we would get a good idea also of how much God loves us. And this is the love that we have to show and give to the others.

When we get a good idea of how and how much God loves us, then we would have a good picture also of how to love ourselves as we are and as we ought to be. Let's remember that our duty to love others should reflect the way we love ourselves, which in turn should be based on God's love for us.

It would be a love that is full of patience, hope, mercy and compassion. It would be a love dripping with affection and understanding, and ever willing to make sacrifices for the others, even to the point of martyrdom. It would be a love that would know how to deal with everyone as he or she is, warts and all, and yet always concerned with leading him or her to what, how and where he ought to be.

In the end, it would be a love that aspires to bring everyone, first ourselves and then everybody else, to attain the fullness of his or her dignity, making everyone a true image and likeness of God, a true child of God, with his or her personhood fully developed and lived.

It would be a love that would move one toward a full communion of himself with God and with everybody else, a communion based on God's love. It is a very dynamic kind of love that would never say enough in its efforts to pursue its ultimate goal.

This kind of love is fully shown to us by Christ who loved us all the way to the cross. The ultimate expression of love has been done by Christ who himself said: “Greater love than this no man has, that a man lays down his life for his friends.” (Jn 15,13)

This kind of love can only be achieved if one is also vitally identified with Christ. It simply cannot be done using one's own powers alone. Our faculties and powers need the ultimate and indispensable fuel of God. They just cannot be run by our own will power, much less, by the dynamics of our natural and worldly forces.

For this kind of love to develop in us, we need to pray, meditate on the life of Christ who is the pattern of divine love, and have constant recourse to the Holy Spirit who is the very power that makes this love alive and burning in us.

Obviously, we need to familiarize ourselves with the details of that love as articulated by the doctrine of our faith that in turn is taught authoritatively by the Church. And so, we need to have a kind of on-going formation, since the content of our faith is inexhaustible as it is a living faith, ever renewed and updated and yet remaining faithful to an absolute, unchanging core.

We have to be wary of simply relying on a love based on sentimentalism alone, and worse, on some ideologies that do not capture, nay, that distort the true nature and essence of man, of love, and human sexuality.

At the moment, we are confronted with what the Pope refers to as “ideological colonization,” for example, the gender ideology that is behind the same-sex unions. We have to be prepared to clarify this twisted issue.*

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