"So start to love your neighbor. Share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless pauper into your house. Clothe the naked, and do not despise the servants of your kin... By loving your neighbor, by having care for your neighbor, you are travelling on a journey." St Augustine's Treatise on St. John
Thinking of the spiritual life as a journey is a helpful metaphor because it frees us from needing to be someplace or get somewhere. People on journeys or pilgrimages are not much concerned about social status, political views or cultural norms. Rather, they are seekers who want to experience something new, something different from what they have always known. Seekers are the kind of people who eat to live, not live to eat. They are not tourists who need to see ten things every day, but pilgrims who want to experience each day as sit comes. They are more concerned with knowing the people and community in which they live than accomplishing something for their own satisfaction.
In today's Office of Readings, St Augustine reminds us that the best way to begin a journey and live as pilgrims is to love our neighbors, whoever they might be. When we break bread with the hungry and give a place in our hearts to the homeless everything changes. We realize that the hungry and homeless are people just like us, not objects to be fed but children of God with whom we will travel. It is not simply our generosity that is so attractive to those who witness our love, but our relationship with the poor that will call others to "get on the bus" as together we seek God.
Anyone who has ever had the privilege of walking with another in terrible need will tell you that they received much more than they gave, and the memory of being loved for helping the lost will sustain us forever.
Today, don't go looking for someone in need, love the neighbor right next to you.
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