Can love be commanded?

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:36-37).

Can love be commanded? A friend once told me, “If love is the result of an order, then be prepared for a really short honeymoon.” I think that behind my friend’s statement is the idea that love is a feeling, that love is a spontaneous yearning, that love is romance. But I think that love goes beyond emotion, desire, and sentimentality. Love is a decision. And love is lived out not during the fantasy of the honeymoon period but in the reality of everyday life.

Love is a choice and a commitment. We can see this more clearly if we take note of the “with all your” phrases that follow God’s command.

With all your mind: An important part of love is knowing your beloved. This is why there is a time for courtship and an engagement period. But even after getting married, a man and a woman should never stop trying to get to know each other more. It is the same way with our faith. Even after being taught our first prayers by our parents, even after undergoing the catechism sessions that prepared us for First Holy Communion and Confirmation, even after getting high marks in our religion classes, we cannot stop trying to get to know our God more.

When Jesus tells us to love God with all our mind, he is telling us to make a decision to learn more about God. What efforts have you made to expand what you know about God? Riches abound in between the covers of a book you probably have in your home now. Is your Bible just gathering dust or is it frequently opened, read, and consulted? Have you gone beyond merely knowing about God to the level of knowing God more personally? Was the last time you went on a retreat because it was required by your school? When was the last time God entered your conversations and encounters with people — and not because you had a special petition but because you sincerely wanted to be enlightened by what God meant in the lives of others?

With all your heart: Off the top of your head, make a list of what has been taking up your time and passion these past few days. No need to follow a certain order or to rank the items in your list just yet, but stop when you have 10. Now look at those 10 and cross out 5 items you can do without. When you have only 5 left, drop 2 more. Then from the remaining 3, take away 2. What is left on your list?  Is it somehow related to God? Did God even make it to your Top 10?

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). To love God with all your heart means to prioritize the Lord above everything else, to make God the treasure for whom we sell all that we have. How much do you value God? To make this question more concrete, try to calculate how much of your day and your energy is spent on, with, and for the Lord. What can you cross out to give God more space in your life? Love is a decision; it is something about which you decide. It is no accident that the word “decide” shares the same ending as “homicide,” “pesticide,” and other words that have to do with putting something to death. “Cide” comes from the Latin word caedere, which means to kill. What do you have to “kill” in your life so that you can be more alive to God?

With all your soul: This “with all your” phrase is actually what makes the other “with all your” phrases and the command to love possible. The Hebrew word translated as soul is nephesh. The Greek word is psyche. Both nephesh and psyche can be translated as life. Now a human being becomes alive only when the breath of God or the life of God is breathed into him or her. We are alive because of God’s life in us. And because of God’s life in us, we can love the Lord with all our mind and with all our heart.

Love is not a feeling; it is a decision. It does not mean though that a life lived in love is a life lived without romance. Sometimes, we are blessed with the feelings that make love gush forth from us. But we cannot depend on these emotions alone for the simple reason that they will never be enough. Many times, we just have to make the decision to love.

During the first few months I served as a hospital chaplain, I dreaded hearing the phone ring. More often than not, it meant I had to run to someone’s bedside to accompany him or her as death came. Dying, suffering, and more dying — that was the bulk of what I faced each day. Needless to say, I was not hopping, skipping, and jumping from ward to ward. And I found myself escaping more and more to the bright lights and cheery displays of the shopping mall beside the hospital. But love is a decision. When quick breaks turned into extended aimless meanderings, I knew I had to “kill” my trips to the mall. With gritted teeth and clenched fists, I trudged back to the hospital. I had to do what I had to do. But as my teeth were ground and my nails carved niches in my palms, grace also came.

Her name was Wilhelmina. She suffered long and hard, but she never complained. And when her time finally and mercifully came, she went with so much peace that I was assured the prayer priests say for the dead was not an empty promise: “Lord, for your faithful people, life is changed, not ended.” We go on in God’s love. How else could Wilhelmina have faced death the way she did? I had told Wilhelmina many words about God as she endured her sickness, but in the end, she was the one who helped me know God more. I will never forget her eyes as she passed on. Silently but eloquently, they spoke, “God can be trusted. He is faithful.” Leaving her room, gritted teeth gave way to a sincere, “Thank you, Lord,” and clenched fists opened slowly to receive more grace from God. The rest of my day was filled with more dying and more suffering — things did not suddenly become easy. But there was more light after that. While I was making a decision to love God in what I was doing, God was giving me the love I needed not just to keep on going but to love even more.

Deciding to love God in others will always be challenging. But deciding to love God opens us up to receive more of God’s love, too. Maybe this is why Jesus commanded us to love God in the first place — not because God needs our love but because we need to be pushed to receive his. Decide to love and love will be given you in good measure, shaken, pressed down, yet still overflowing.