“[L]ove is an injustice, because when we love it is the one or ones who are special to us that we save.” This provocative observation made by anthropologist Naisargi Davé in her insightful essay “Love and Other Injustices: On Indifference to Difference” might seem shocking to Christians who have been taught again and again that love is precisely what God expects of them. Yet, it seems to me that Davé’s clever remark hits at the core of one of Jesus’s central teachings, one that is made particularly evident in this Sunday’s readings. 

In her work with animal activists in India, Davé realized that to care boundlessly is to be overwhelmed: there is always more to be done; one can never care for every being and, if one tries, exhaustion is unavoidable. Then, one either drowns or stops caring altogether. But, Davé asserts, “there is a third solution – the one most of us choose – which is to love. To differentiate.” For her, love is a rational choice that protects us from “the twinned abyss of everything and nothing” by setting a limit to the number of people we care for. However, such a love can only be premised on a “politics of distinction” that Davé refuses to embrace. Instead, she argues for indifference to difference. In her recent book befittingly titled Indifference, she argues for an ethics of immanent encounters in which one is open to being transformed by the other and refuses to impose oneself on the other in any way. Indifference to difference is a way of being in the world that strives for relations in which transformative affects can circulate and move us without us seeking to dominate, possess, or fix.

This is where Davé’s surprising conclusions about love meet Jesus’s equally shocking affirmation in this Sunday’s reading: “If any of you come to me without turning your back on your mother and your father, your loved ones, your sisters and brothers, indeed your very self, you cannot be my follower” (Lk 14:26). At first sight, Jesus appears to be telling the crowds not to love those closest to them. In a sense – the sense of love as an injustice – he does. This becomes clearer at the end of the reading, when Jesus adds: “You cannot be my disciple if you do not say goodbye to all of your possessions” (Lk 14:33). There, the type of relation that Jesus denounces is one based on the possession of the other, an “impassioned preference,” to use Davé’s words, that gives one rights over someone else. 

Yet, in many other places in the Gospels, Jesus does command us to love. How are we, then, to do so? Many verses throughout the Bible could have been chosen to reflect on this question. I am, however, drawn towards a passage in Matthew very similar to the one cited above where Jesus says: “Those who love mother or father, daughter or son more than me are not worthy of me” (Mt 10:37). In this challenging verse, Jesus is not telling us, despite appearances, that we should avoid loving our family members. He is rather saying that we should love him first, just as his first commandment was to “love the Most High God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind” (Mt 22:37). Jesus does not teach us not to love our parents and siblings, but to love them through him. As theologian Simone Weil put it: “We should not go to our neighbour for the sake of God, but we should be impelled towards our neighbour by God, as the arrow is driven towards its target by the archer.” The psalmist is right in saying that we should seek refuge in God (Ps 90). But such a refuge should not isolate us from the world. Instead, it should shoot us right back into the world, filled with God’s love (Ps 90:14), that is, a love that does not rest on preferential attachments to discrete individuals, but rather takes the form of a way of being in the world in which there are no more subordinates, but only beloved brothers and sisters (Phlm 16), united in difference, walking side by side in the expanse of Relation, open to being touched and transformed by their mutual encounters.

Over the last two years, I have come to know many sisters of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, an apostolic community founded in Montreal in the second half of the 17th century and active today in several countries. As part of the anthropological research that I am currently conducting, I spent a year with the sisters in Quebec, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. With them, I learned a lot about love, transformative relations, and God. The CND sisters define their spirituality as one of Visitation-Pentecost. Throughout my year with them, I got to understand this spirituality as one that encourages a constant going-towards the other. Like Mary with her cousin Elizabeth, CND sisters are called to bring God to the people they meet. Like Elizabeth with Mary, they are also called to recognize God in the people they encounter. To live the spirituality of the Visitation is to train your senses in a way that allows you to bring God to others and to be moved by God, as God is present in others. In this series of encounters in which each party grows in love and is always made more aware of God’s presence among us, a path is opened, slowly, for the Holy Spirit – Pentecost. Therefore, the more you encounter people in a spirit of Visitation-Pentecost, the more you open yourself for the action of the Holy Spirit and for the construction of God’s Kingdom. In my view, the CND sisters that I had the chance to meet during my research are excellent examples of what it means to embody love as the openness to transformative encounters that I have described in my reflection.

This beautiful stained-glass work by sisters Pauline Dufresne and Joséphine Saucier represents the scene of the Visitation, when Mary and Elizabeth met and were both moved by the presence of God in their midst.

Source: Sister Pauline Dufresne, CND (S.S.-Victor-Marie) and Sister Joséphine Saucier, CND (S.S-Édouard-de-la-Charité), Stained Glass Benediction, 20th century, stained glass (glass and copper), 11,3 x 11,3 x 21 cm, Archives Congrégation de Notre-Dame – Montréal, collection Archives des arts (2801).