The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 600 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 10 trips to carry that many people.
Luke 10:27
And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.
So many times – too many times – people think that Christianity is all about rules. I’m a member of the Catholic Church (Roman Rite) so I hear the rules criticism all the time in the Media. Gratefully, I understand that Christianity is not about rules. Christianity is about love. Now, I don’t in any way mean that the Commandments should be thrown out – quite the contrary. The 10 Commandments given to Moses by God should be embraced – should be loved. The essence of what God is asking us to do is to be who God created us to be: persons of love. First and foremost we must embrace the truth that God is love. And we, being created in the image and likeness of God, are images and likenesses of love.
That’s a whole lot of use of the word love in one paragraph… But… what is love?
Love is the gift of self.
Before the universe existed, God IS. God is Being Itself and generously gives this beingness to what He creates, to what is not strictly God Godself – to what is other than God. This generous giving of self to the other is true gift. And God created “man in His own image; male and female He created them.”[i] God is One, there is only one God, and, in our limited human understanding, we Christians believe in one God in three Divine Persons. The Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, has been described as Lover (loving), Beloved (loved), and Love (the communion between and within lover and beloved). As human persons we are given, by God, not only the ability to love as God loves, giving and receiving, but also the very identity of love itself. Pope John Paul II said, “a person is an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love.”[ii]
In the book of Genesis we hear God say, “It is not good for man to be alone.” We are made for loving relationship. Among all the creatures of God, it is only in our fellow human beings, our fellow Divine images, that we can experience true loving communion – and therefore be truly and wholly ourselves. No other created being “offers man the basic conditions that make it possible to exist in a relation of reciprocal gift.”[iii] God is love and we are created to be love – and this means that a “person” should never be treated as a means, a way or a tool used to get something else. If we want to know the truth, then we need to know that persons are gifts of love and are fulfilled only when giving and receiving love, in loving communion with God and with one another.
Sometimes we use the word love in a different kind of way – for things, namely. I can say, “I love God, I love my parents, I love beauty, I love ice cream” and mean “love” a little differently each time. When Christ sums up the 10 commandments and reiterates the divine commandment to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves, he is not speaking of the kind of love in which “we draw to ourselves what is outside of us when by that very love we love things other than ourselves inasmuch as they are useful or delightful to us.”[iv] Rather, we are being told to love with all our hearts, souls, strength, minds, in a divine way in which “we draw ourselves to what is outside. For, to those whom we love in that love we are related to as ourselves, communicating ourselves to them in some way.”[v] So, when I love my neighbor as myself, it is not with the kind of self-love in which I find myself exclusively delightful and seek to please myself – that would be a disordered kind of self-love. Rather, when I love my neighbor as myself, it is with the kind of love – true love – that is of my very being, that is who I am, being created by Love. Christ Jesus says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”[vi] To truly love ourselves, we must remember that God first loved us. Anytime we want to know who we are created to be, we should look to Jesus Christ, who is fully divine and fully human. And when we look to Christ, we see true love – for he gives of himself completely – Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity – giving of himself to us. That’s how we are to love.
When I was younger, I heard of Christian love as sacrificial love. These days, oddly and sadly, “sacrificial” has taken on some negative connotations, as though we’ve lost the spirit of generosity. I believe that’s because we’ve lost the sense of who we are – not our own, but God’s own. This means that we also have taken for granted the gift of life. And by doing this, we also take for granted the self-gift that is true love. We love because God first loved us. To freely and gratefully accept this gift is our first act of love – and we truly accept this gift by loving the Giver. Not “delighting in” the pleasure of being alive, per se, but by realizing who we are: gifts of divine love. We realize this by being gifts – by giving. This true self-awareness is the true and good and right kind of self-love. It is how we are able to love our neighbors as ourselves. It is how we are able to love God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds. The giving of ourselves as a gift to the other is also the very “acceptance of the other as a gift. These two functions of the mutual exchange are deeply connected in the whole process of the “gift of self”: giving and accepting the gift interpenetrate in such a way that the very act of giving becomes acceptance, and acceptance transforms itself into giving.”[vii]
And we don’t give in order to be thanked. We don’t give in order to get some thing in return, some pleasure or other kind of self-centered prize. (Although God is good and He has made us so that we may be able to experience true and deep joy when giving and receiving true love.) And we don’t give because the rules say so! We don’t give as a kind of blind obedience in order to satisfy the letter of the law. For we cannot be “blind” if we are loving with our whole heart, with our whole souls, with all of our strength, and with all of our minds. We are, rather, loving with the entirety of ourselves – because we are giving ourselves entirely. And the reason that we freely give is because we are free gifts. The 10 commandments are examples of how we are to love. It is only if we have no real love, if we merely use others instead of seeing ourselves and others as pure gifts, that we would seek to kill, or lie, or steal, or cheat, or covet, or betray. The 10 commandments serve as guideposts to help us discern whether or not we are being who we were created to be.
It’s all about true love.
[i] Genesis 1:27
[ii] Wojtyla, Karol. Love and Responsibility. Translated by H. T. Willetts. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981, p. 41
[iii] Wojtyla, Karol. Man and Woman He Created Them: a Theology of the Body. Translated by Michael Waldstein. Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006, audience 14:1
[iv] Aquinas, Thomas. Lectures on John, Chapter 15, Lecture 4, Marietta #2036 from Waldstein, p. 129.
[v] ibid.
[vi] John 15:12
[vii] Wojtyla, Karol. Man and Woman He Created Them: a Theology of the Body. Translated by Michael Waldstein. Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006, audience 17:4
Revelation 14:6-7
And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people,
Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.
Waiting for the end of the world? Waiting for some calamity to strike – a meteor, nuclear war, Facebook filing Chapter 11? People hold up signs saying “The End Is Near” and expect Doomsday to meet them around the corner. But, the world doesn’t have to end, the earth explode, for the hour of the Lord to come. That hour is right now. And now. And now. And – yup, here it is again. Because time and space belong to the eternal and infinite Source – to “the ultimate reality that everyone calls God.”[1] This is His house. He’s already here.
If we wait for man-made apocalypse or the natural expiration of our solar system – or even if we wait until we are on our deathbeds because of terminal illness or old age – until we think about eternity, ultimate reality, the human soul, and what lies beyond this life, then we aren’t fully living. We are not fully human, fully alive, unless we look beyond ourselves – not only beyond our own personal needs in the giving of love and charity, but also beyond our own skins, beyond our own eyeballs. We did not create ourselves. We did not bring ourselves into being. There is an Uncreated Creator, an Uncaused Cause. As the poet Rumi says,
“I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.”
And earlier in the poem, My Soul Is from Elsewhere, as translated by Coleman Banks, Rumi speaks the timeless human question:
“Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.”
Neither can I stop asking and never should I cease to plunge myself into the Mystery of Being. The Unmoved Mover stirs my heart with restlessness until it rests in the heart of the Beloved One, Infinite/Eternal Love.
And angels fly in the midst of heaven, beyond the seeing of my corporal eyes, with the message from the foundation of Creation – What is, is. Do not be blind. Too willing to shut off any detection of the spiritual, lest we know that the end is here. The end that is the beginning – not like the pointless going around of a circle, or a nifty Jedi/Zen trick of the mind. What truly is, is, always was and always will be. Eternity isn’t something after. Eternity is here and now. And, to the One Who is the Source of All Being, the key moment is eternally now. The moment of import, the moment that impacts my immortal soul, is now. It was never waiting for me at the end of my days or at the End of Days. My home, my true self, my eternity, was always where it should be, though I may not possess the eyes to see.
The glory of life is that it is given. To thank and celebrate with the Giver is to revel in the gift. “The glory of God is Man fully alive”[2]– let’s not wait until our beautiful bodies splash back into the pool. As we are sent forth, let us leap up in joy and praising, giving glory to the Hour of the Lord as God glories in our eyes wide open, our souls full throttle, the message of the angels received… and the love given given in return. Home. Now and always.
James 2:17-18
Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.
Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works.
Here, in these writings, I try to explore the deepest mysteries of life, seeking answers to the everlasting questions rising up from the human heart. Nothing that I write here is disingenuous. I love truth too much to write about anything other than what I honestly believe. Here, in words that I have chosen, I lay out my faith, inviting others to share with me what God has given. If there is deep and eternal truth expressed through any my words, it is the truth that comes from eternity, from the Source of all Being and the Source of all Grace. Being human, I am but a reflection of that truth. Created in God’s image, I reflect.
If the faith about which I write is true faith, honestly my own faith, than I will not only reflect upon the truth in my mind and heart with words, but I will also reflect the truth out into the world with my whole self. Actions speak in ways that mere words cannot. My deepest desire is to love Truth Itself, Beauty Itself, Love Itself, and so, to love God – to love God with all my heart and with all my soul, with all my mind and with all my strength. Christ pleads with me from the Cross, begs me to be like unto him, to love as he loves – utterly and completely. What am I willing to give, what am I willing to do, for the sake of love, for the sake of my beloved? I should be willing to thirst… to be fatigued, to even be in agony if that’s what it takes in order to truly love.[i]
How do I love? The poor are among us, all around us: the blind who need help in order to see, the deaf who need help in order to hear, the immobile who need help in order to move.[ii] There are strangers to be welcomed and outcasts to be forgiven; there are wounded to be healed and sick to be cared for; there are hungry to feed and homeless to shelter; and there are those who find themselves imprisoned – by crimes of their own doing, by addictions, mental illnesses, or by loneliness – who need to be visited. Do I take the time and effort to go out of my own way to help my fellow human beings in need? Too often, I’m afraid, my answer is no. Many times I won’t even go out of my own way to be of assistance to my loved ones who are struggling right next to me, because I think that they deserve to suffer a little for some offense that I’m holding against them. In those times, am I not seeing splinters in the eyes of others while being oblivious to the beam in my own?[iii]
And if I won’t get out of my own way in order to take action and help someone in need, then I will never put myself in Christ’s way. I will never find myself on the road upon which he walks, so that I may ask for what he wills and receive his blessing — and thank him.[iv] When I pass from this life and hope to step into the next, I might call out to Christ and say, “Lord, Lord!” But he may say to me in response, “I never knew you[v]… For I was hungry and you didn’t feed me, I was thirsty and you did not give me drink, I was naked and you didn’t clothe me, a stranger and you didn’t welcome me, sick and you didn’t care for me, in prison and you didn’t visit me.”[vi] And, oh, the deep, painful sorrow I will feel cutting into my heart… for then I will suddenly recognize all the opportunities that I had in my earthly life to meet Christ face-to-face, to be with him and to love him tenderly, generously, selflessly, with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and all my strength… and I did nothing.
Forgive me, my Lord, for all the times that I have forsaken you! For all those lazy, callous and spiteful moments in my life when I took no action to help you in your struggles. I, personally, am not physically strong, like Simon of Cyrene[vii], to be able to hold you up bodily – but I do have enough ability, like a Veronica, to wipe your eyes and provide a moment’s soothing. I can go out of my own way and find you on the road that you travel – on my street, in my community, in my own home – and hold you gently, lovingly, with all that I have and all that I am. Help me, Lord, so that my faith is not dead and alone, but living truly and fully with you – for you, everywhere that you are.
Bible Bursts 