Years ago, when I made my Cursillo, as we processed in to the chapel for the closing worship, we sang: “and they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That was very powerful for me after having spent three whole days surrounded and upheld by Love, God’s love infused in and poured out by the volunteer staff who spent the entire weekend giving of themselves to us pilgrims. That kind of self-giving to others is what Jesus means when he says, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

The example Jesus gives is himself. “Just as I have loved you,” he says. To me, that means his patience with their continual misunderstanding of his way, his feeding, healing and teaching at every opportunity, his celebrating and grieving with them as called for by the occasion, his compassion for those who came to him, his self-abnegation with the washing of their feet, his forgiveness of those wounding him, his complete sacrifice of his life on the cross. At the Green Bough House of Prayer in Adrian, GA, when I make my annual retreat, there is a mural over the door exiting from the chapel of the Christ-figure pelican, seated in a nest, surrounded by wheat sheaves and grapes, feeding her young from the blood of her breast (an ancient traditional Christian symbol). That model of compassionate and self-sacrificing love as one, filled with the body and blood of Christ, goes forth into the world demonstrates the powerful dimension of our call to love one another as Jesus loved us.

Such love for others can only be generated in us when we open our hearts to receive the divine presence in our lives and allow the transforming grace of the Holy Spirit to shine through us out into the world. Then “they will know we are Christians by our love.”