Loving Your Neighbor

Loving Your Neighbor: Weekly Summary
Saturday, October 31, 2026

Sunday
Imagine how different the world would be if we just obeyed that one commandment to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
— Richard Rohr

Monday
Jesus reminded his Jewish followers that the most important of all the Holy One’s prescriptions are “to love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength” and “to love your neighbor as yourself.” — Mirabai Starr

Tuesday
There’s a staging in our growth in love. We have to start with self-love and respecting the self. If we don’t respect ourselves, we won’t know how to respect anybody else. — Richard Rohr

Wednesday
In our quest to make neighborly love a reality, we have, in addition to the inspiring example of the good Samaritan, the magnanimous life of our Christ to guide us. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Thursday
Jesus is what the living, breathing will of God looks like. This includes compassion for the poor, esteem for women, healing for the sick, and solidarity with the suffering. — Rachel Held Evans

Friday
Love is who we are. When we love, we are acting according to our deepest being, our deepest truth. We are operating according to our dignity. — Richard Rohr


Week Forty-Three Practice: The Vulnerability of Loving Another

The author Laurie Brock reflects on Jesus’s invitation to “love one another” as an act of vulnerability:

In the Gospel of John, Jesus gathers with his disciples on the night before he is crucified. They eat a meal, and then Jesus begins to teach them. Love one another, as I have loved you, he says.

Love like this is deeply and profoundly vulnerable and unspeakably beautiful. It is the love that we as humans need to function and, more so, to thrive.

Then Jesus washes his disciples’ bare feet. I’ve always imagined Jesus himself to be barefooted too. I suspect that he becomes deeply vulnerable in this way—even with those he knows will abandon and betray him.

This incarnate vulnerability in Jesus touches the dusty, dirty feet of the men who say they love him too—and then will leave him bleeding.

Like Moses, like Jesus, we too are called to go to holy places of vulnerability in our lives of faith. We unlace, unbuckle, kick off, and toss aside the inventions that we assume will protect us.

We step out of convention and expectation. We kick off the things of beauty that complete our outfit—the external costume we put on to embellish the roles we inhabit day in and day out. We finally take off the shoes that don’t fit and let the bones and tendons and flesh of our selves and souls connect with the earth.

We may deliberately seek out these holy encounters. But often we stumble into them, having walked down roads that seemed benign at first, even exciting. Then we realize the prayer we’ve prayed is answered.

God really does mean for us to love our neighbor as ourselves, even the one supporting a different political agenda.

God really does want us to care for the outcasts, even when doing so means we have to venture out of our own comfortable places.

God really does mean to love when love means we have to be vulnerable to those with whom we are in relationship.