How do I Love Thee?

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Calla Lily Love

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30)

Whenever I come across this imperative in the gospels, my thoughts stray to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43, How do I Love Thee? It begins, “How do I love thee? Let me count (list) the ways,” and then in the standard fourteen lines to which sonnets are restricted, her poem itemizes ten dimensions that characterize the speakers love for, not God, but a dear person. (I’ve attached her poem at the end of this meditation.)

Question for me is, “When it comes to loving God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength, do I know what I actually mean? Could I list the ways?

Does love really have two meanings, one that speaks of feeling and another focussed on doing. Is one aspect of love illustrated by “when I hear the knock on the door, I hope against hope that it will be you?” and another, “when I see anyone hungry, I stop what I’m doing and rush to bring them bread?” And if that’s true, how do I recognize love given to a God who doesn’t need me, who is to all intents and purposes silent and invisible?

In hymns and prayers we praise and worship the invisible God. Are these expressions of love of a kind that issues from a loving heart, soul and mind? And if the God we’re exhorted to love is the same as the creator of every good thing, is the respect, the care, the protection of all creation the love that needs all our strength? And would that not include our neighbours, all those who chanced to “fall among thieves” particularly, making the “and your neighbour as yourself” redundant?

Is Jesus’ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,’” (Matthew 25:40) a solid guidepost on the way to loving God? And would that take all of our heart, soul, mind and strength? And if so, do we love God by loving our neighbour who is God’s creation?

HOW DO I LOVE THEE?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

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