If you’ve ever had a broken bone, you know that not only is it painful, but it limits you. It limits you from normal movement, it prevents you from doing the things you used to do. It could be as little as a broken toe, or as debilitating as fractured hip or vertebrae, and everything in-between. Each limit you in some way. You are fractured. You can do things partially, but not fully as you could when healthy.
Today Jesus tells us the first and most important commandment – that you should love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.
And then He tells us the second one – that you should love others as you love yourself.
But like a broken bone, our souls are fractured. Each of us have a fractured soul in some way, some more severe than others. But our fractured souls limit us. Our fractured souls limit our ability to fully love God, and to fully love our neighbor, and to fully love our self.
And so, when I read Jesus’ words about the first and second commandments, it begins with loving God fully, and ends with loving ourselves. But I think to love God fully and to love our neighbors fully, it starts with us. It starts with you. It starts with me. It starts with loving our self. Truly loving our self. Not being selfish. Loving the person that God made us to be.
If we are broken, if our soul is fractured by sin, we cannot fully love our self. If we cannot fully love our self, we cannot fully love God and we cannot fully love our neighbor.
We can do so partially, but we are limited. And that is the major problem in the world today. We are broken, and that limits our ability to love.
The thing is, only God can heal us. Through prayer, scripture, the Sacraments, and through others who He puts in our life – He heals us. But we have to wantit. We have to be looking for it. We have towantto be healed. We have to wantto love. If we don’t want to love, if we don’t want that fractured soul to be healed, we’ll be limited in what we can actually do.
That’s the mystery – we are to fully love God with all our soul, to love others with all our heart as we love ourselves. But we can’t fully love when our soul is fractured. And the only One who can heal us is Christ. It starts with us, but we must first turn to God.
We have to surrender to God, and let Him into our soul, and want Him to enter, and He will. Only then can we be healed, and only then can we truly love Him, our neighbors, and ourselves with every fiber of our being, with every bit of our soul.
Without Him we are fractured, and limited. When we reach up to Him, we are unbroken.
