WHY oh why did Christ command his disciples so? (cfr. Lk 6,27) The quick answer is that despite our unavoidable differences and conflicts, even the very serious ones, in the end we are all brothers and sisters, we are all children of God, and we just have to love one another irrespective of how we are with each other.
We need to prepare ourselves to follow this commandment expressly articulated by Christ. We have to have a strong faith to trust his words, so that we would not consider them as a mere bluff, an empty puffy rhetoric, but rather as what is true, proper and ideal for us.
We have to have a strong faith to trust his words, so that we would readily understand that they are meant for all of us, and not just for some, and that they are necessary and obligatory, and not merely optional, though they have to be taken up freely, and not coercively.
We just have to understand also that we can only manage to follow this commandment if we truly are with God through Christ in the Spirit. He, after all, is the source, the power and the pattern of how this kind of love can take place.
So, the challenge to face and the task to do is how to immerse ourselves in God, practically identifying ourselves with him, since we are meant to be his image and likeness. Our true and ultimate dignity and identity is that of being children of God.
In other words, the fullness and perfection of our humanity is when we finally become like God which can only take place in heaven. But while here on earth, we just have to do our best to pursue that ideal.
To be sure, on God’s part, all the means are already made available. We are already given the doctrine of our faith so we would know what right and wrong are in our earthly pilgrimage. We are given the sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist, so we can truly be identified with Christ who is the pattern of our humanity. We have the Church and the accompaniment of angels, saints and holy people, etc.
If, indeed, we are God’s image and likeness, if we are his children through Christ in the Holy Spirit, and therefore meant to adopt his mind, his will and his ways, and ultimately to enter into the very life of God, then we have no other alternative but to make this explicit injunction second nature to us.
Obviously, we cannot follow this principle on our own, relying solely on our own powers. We need God himself to enable us to do so. And he has given us that power through his grace which he gives us in abundance through his living word, through his sacraments, through his Church, and in many other mysterious ways unknown to us.
In fact, God gives himself to us through Christ who makes himself the “bread of life” which he asks us to eat, otherwise we would not have “life in abundance.” It’s really just for us to believe, to make that leap of faith, going beyond but never neglecting what our senses and reason can capture, so we can enter into a far richer reality given to us by faith.
This is the challenge we have to face—how to free ourselves from the controlling grip of our senses and reasoning, of our own human consensus and estimations of things, and to let ourselves be guided by the mysterious ways of our faith, full of wisdom and charity albeit always accompanied by sacrifices.
Only then can we manage to love our enemies!
The beauty we crave
One morning, a woman passed a street mural, a burst of color erupting on an otherwise bare concrete wall. She scarcely took a second look, swatting it away as mere painted nonsense. Several paces forward, she hesitated, reversed direction, and looked again.
Something about it—perhaps the furious woman’s eyes in the painting, perhaps the dance of light and shadow over her painted skin—halted her. Art does that. It stops us, compels us to stand still, and takes us out of our habit to remind us that life is more than function and purpose. But the tragedy is this: so many still believe that art is an accessory, a luxury, even an indulgence when in reality, it is one of man’s most natural and basic appetites.
People buy what is beautiful. No one chooses an ugly plate if they can have a better one. No one goes into a store and asks for the least ugly shirt on the rack. We’re programmed to seek beauty, but we trivialize the very individuals who make it happen. Artists—painters, writers, sculptors, musicians—are frequently called dreamers, their efforts devalued as unrealistic, their lives questioned: “What’s the point?” The irony is that even the people ridiculing them inhabit a world created by artists. The things they read, the films they watch, the music they listen to, even the design of the buildings they enter—each one of these is imagined by artistic minds.
Artists only create fiction, something in the mind that has no value in life. But is not fiction another truth? A novel is fiction, but it is a true expression of human emotions. A picture can present to us something that never was, but it can make us experience something real. Art is not lying—it is reality as described from a different perspective, another vocabulary, another point of view. If anything, art portrays truths that are normally disregarded. It reminds us of beauty not only in the magnificent and the wonderful but in the mundane—a cracked sidewalk during sundown, the sound of children’s laughter reverberating off a courtyard, the path rain etches along the surface of a weathered windowpane.
And beauty—beauty born of the heart, deep-seated—has power. It heals. It consoles. It makes existence endurable. Folks attend concerts to shed the weight of their worries. They hang paintings on their walls because viewing them brings tranquility. They resort to poetry when their hearts are shattered, and to movies when they need to feel. And even when history was blackest, there was still art. War camp prisoners etched masterpieces out of tatters, beating hopelessness with beauty. Poems penned when there was tyranny became the voices of the era. A single photo ended the war. This is not a fantasy. This is survival.
But the world continues to retain artists as ornaments, rather than necessities. School boards eliminate art classes first when budgets suffer as if imagination is something to be cut back. Parents dissuade their children from the arts for fear they will never be able to earn a living as if passion should only be pursued if it is lucrative. Governments spend on roads, bridges, and factories but refuse to spend on artists, not knowing that culture—life’s blood—is within their grasp. A nation without artists is a nation without memory, without identity, without soul.
If we deleted all the work of all the artists in the world, what would remain? No paintings, no songs, no stories, no films. Cities would be gray, walls blank, bookshelves bare. Even commercials—those ubiquitous jingles and intrusive billboards—would vanish. How hollow, how sterile a world that would be. But for all the small worth that they possess, artists persevere. They compose, they paint, and they compose music, not because they have been told to do so, but because they have to. Because there is a flame inside them that will not be put out, a light that holds on even when everyone else drops the belief that beauty must be created.
As we celebrate Arts Month, keep this in mind: artists are not only owed our applause but respect. They’re not entertainers or decorators of life. They’re architects of emotion, guardians of history, warriors of beauty. And if we knew their value, we would not just survive their presence—we would fight to make them flourish. Because at the end of the day, a world without art is not one that we would want to live in.