Praised be Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!
People oftentimes accept Whitney Houston’s song as
Gospel truth: “I found the greatest love of all inside of me. The greatest love
of all is easy to achieve…learning to love yourself is the greatest love of
all.” Of course, our time greatly values self-esteem, which is basically
founded on self love. There is much emphasis on the self to the point that we
have become narcissistic.
There is no question that the Lord commanded us to
love our own selves. If it were not so, then how could he command: “Love your
neighbor as yourself”? It seems that for a healthy relationship with others to
take place, you must first have a healthy relationship with yourself. In other
words, self-acceptance is the pre requisite to accepting and loving others.
But saying this is to miss the whole point of today’s
reading. Remember that “Love your neighbor as yourself” is only the second
commandment. The first is this: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord
alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your
soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The Lord shows us the
primacy of love for God. This is the first and the greatest of all
commandments. Learning to love yourself is not the greatest love of all. Before
we can learn to love our neighbor or even love ourselves, we have to love God
with the totality of our being – with all our heart, all our soul, all our
mind, and all our strength. Why is this so? It is because I am not the center
of the universe – God is! “The Lord our God is Lord alone!” God does not owe me
anything but I owe Him everything. Everything I have and everything I am comes
from Him. Why do I have to love Him with all my heart, my soul, my mind, and my
strength? It is because of all me came from Him and belongs to Him. “In Him we
live, in Him we move, in Him we have our being” (Acts 17: 28). Without Him, I
am nothing.
Because God is the origin, the first, the center, and
the end of everything, He is the only one I must love for His own sake. This
means that I should love God for the simple reason that He is who He is: God.
Everything else and everyone else I should love only in reference to God…only
for the sake of God. This is the essence of Charity as a theological virtue.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “Charity is the theological virtue
by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as
ourselves for the love of God” (CCC, 1822). Charity, according to St. Paul, is
the greatest virtue of all (1 Cor. 13:13). “The practice of all the virtues is
animated and inspired by charity, which ‘binds everything together in perfect
harmony’ (Col 3:14); it is the form of the virtues; it articulates and orders
them among themselves; it is the source and the goal of their Christian
practice. Charity upholds and purifies our human ability to love, and raises it
to the supernatural perfection of divine love” (CCC, 1827).
Let us love with the right priorities. Let us allow Charity
to purify our ability to love. The Christian “no longer stands before God as a
slave in servile fear, or as a mercenary looking for wages, but as a son
responding to the love of him who ‘first loved us’” (CCC, 1828). St. Basil
said: “If we turn away from evil out of fear of punishment, we are in the
position of slaves. If we pursue the enticement of wages…we resemble
mercenaries. Finally if we obey for the sake of the good itself and out of love
for him who commands…we are in the position of children.” (Ibid.)
Jesus, I trust in you. O Mary conceived without sin, pray
for us who have recourse to thee!
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