Five Dialogues on the Greatest Commandment

The Anglican priest and poet Fr. Malcolm Guite writes five dialogues between himself and God on the Greatest Commandment, which appears in our Gospel reading for this Sunday (Mark 12:28-34): “The most important [commandment] is, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Five Dialogues 1: With All Your Heart
With all my heart? You know my heart too well,
It’s Yeats’s rag and bone shop. Will it do
To start my loving in that little hell,
Closed on itself and still excluding you?
Could I not offer you some empty room,
Some small apartment full of light and air,
Some portion of my life, above the gloom,
But not this pit of pride, not this despair.

Only your heart will do. Let me begin,
To break the ground and plant a seed that grows
Up through the closing darkness of your sin
Till your unsightly roots brings forth my rose.
For I have learned to make the broken true
Since my heart too was broken once for you.’

Five Dialogues 2: With All Your Soul
With all my soul? I scarcely know my soul.
The age I live in doesn’t think it’s there,
They cut me up, where you would make me whole,
And think your promise only empty air.
They say I’m hormones, chemical extremes,
Enzymes unwinding blindly, selfish genes,
Just empty gestures and repeated memes.
With all my soul? I don’t know what that means.

Before the first life stirred my spirit called you,
I knew you when I wove you in the dark,
I made you more than all the forms that mould you,
And kindled in your depth my hidden spark
So let them say your soul is empty air,
Love with your soul and you will know it’s there.

Five Dialogues 3: With All Your Strength
With all my strength? What little strength I have
Is shadowed by the instruments of death.
I crawl from dawn to dusk towards my grave
As frail and fleeting as my every breath,
And all the strength of broken humankind
Seems only spent on pain and cruelty,
To magnify the malice of the mind
And crush the poor in deeper poverty.

And that is why you need to love with strength, 
And offer all that little strength to me,
That you might let me mend it, till at length
We bear the weight together, set you free,
As one who knows how all is borne above,
And meets all malice in the strength of Love.

Five Dialogues 4: With All Your Mind
With all my mind? With all my open questions?
My restless questing after hidden truth?
With all my science, all my suppositions?
My search for certainty, my lust for proof?
With all my mind? its logic and obsession,
Its wordless reveries, its language games,
Its reason and its deep imagination
Its mysteries, its riddles and its dreams?

With all your mind, with every gift I gave you,
For every drop of truth is drawn from me.
Not that your mind itself will ever save you,
But that it lives within my mystery.
Ask and be answered, seek and you will find
I am the life of every loving mind.

Five Dialogues 5: Your Neighbour as Yourself
My neighbour as myself? I cannot learn
To love myself at all. I look away,
The dark glass only shames me and I burn
At what should never see the light of day.

I’ll be the judge of that, for in my light
Judgment and healing meet you equally.
The self you loathe is precious in my sight
And I will have you love it into me.
You and your neighbor, both must made whole.
Her heart’s as dark and needy as your own,
So you must love her in her hidden soul, 
The very soul she’s trying to disown.
Love her as you are loved and you will find
Love is your heart, your soul, your strength, your mind.

From Parable and Paradox by Malcolm Guite

Selected by
Bree Snow
Minister of Formation &  Catechesis