Loving Your Neighbor

 

 

 

Loving Your Neighbor

Expanding Our Capacity to Love  

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

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Richard Rohr maps the expansion from self-love and group love to the gospel call of universal love: 

We’re told by developmental psychologists that there’s a staging in our growth in love. We have to start with self-love and respecting the self. If we don’t respect ourselves, we won’t know how to respect anybody else. 

Then God moves us to group love, family love, which is basically the love of people who are connected to us or who are like us. A lot of people don’t even get there. They don’t know how to love their family or those close to them or those in their group. 

From there, God moves us to the third level, which is universal love. I’m afraid a much smaller number of people get to this place. As we see in politics, in our country, and throughout the world, at best most people just get to the second stage of knowing how to love people who are like them: their race, their nationality, their religion, their political party. When we stay at this second stage of group love, we clearly don’t create a healthy society. We can look at countries and politics the world over to witness how this is true.  

In Acts 10, we discover that even Peter had to be taught by the Holy Spirit how to grow in love. Peter was at the stage of group love, believing that God only loved the Jewish people. And then this strange thing happened where the Holy Spirit fell upon gentiles! Peter looked around and said, “Oh my gosh! God seems to be for everybody and not just for the Jewish people!” He understood that it was okay to include gentiles into what eventually became known as the church. In spite of this, most of church history has not really imitated Peter’s insight. We pulled back into group think and group love. 

Peter said, “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. In any country, whoever fears God and acts uprightly is acceptable” (Acts 10:34–35). At that moment he became both a Jewish and Christian heretic! Peter himself began to recognize that God works with all people of goodwill — not just people in his group. But he had to be pushed there. Little by little, God leads him to universal love.