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Crazy Love

Candy Hearts

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.


Today’s Gospel represents perhaps the most important teaching of Jesus, inasmuch as it sums up all the others. Love God with everything you are, and love your neighbor as yourself. Loving God means seeking union with Him in prayer and the sacraments, and obeying His will like a faithful child; loving neighbor means passionately seeking others’ welfare, even though they are imperfect sinners.

And loving neighbor includes doggedly pursuing the welfare of the least fortunate, those who are suffering want, as the first reading tells us. Too often we Christians forget that looking after the needy is not an optional tack-on to our faith, but rather is a core demand of Him who commands us to love our neighbor as ourself.

These messages of love, very difficult to follow because the require deep faith on the one hand and sacrificial charity on the other, are the same messages that St. Paul tirelessly preached to the gentiles in city after city.

Despite his unconquerable faith and hope, St. Paul must have felt discouragement at times. Was this thing ever really going to take off? For Christianity, so new and vulnerable in the hearts of the communities he founded, to survive when he was gone must have seemed like it would require a massive miracle.

But then we see accounts like that found in today’s second reading, where Paul congratulations the Thessalonians not only for keeping the faith, but ultimately spreading it just as he did, with conviction and passion. Moments like this must have really bolstered Paul’s hope.

Sometimes it feels like we’re the only ones crazy enough to embrace unconditionally Jesus’ message. As such, we feel impotent to pass it on to others. When spreading Christ’s message to others, we have to remember that our words are not the protagonist of conversion, but rather nothing more than a catalyst–the grace of Christ working directly in the human heart is the only protagonist of conversion, salvation, and sanctification.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus to make you a catalyst of His redemption. Tell Him you give Him your whole day and your whole life and, even while mindful of your sins, ask Him to take that gift and use it to extend in other souls the same sort of experience of Him and conviction that He has given to you.

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Donuts and Demons

Donut

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.


There are few things more insipid than “Christianity Lite,” whereby our religion is reduced to weak coffee and glazed donuts in the community center, bingo night, and good feelings about neighbor.

Similarly, there are few things more repulsive than self-righteous, taciturn, sour Christianity that reduces all to a set of rules to follow in order to make the cut–it creates Christians who are at once self-satisfied and superior, and also bitter because deep down they realize that they have missed the happiness they were looking for in Christianity.

Conversely, what a gorgeous picture of Christianity St. Paul paints in the first reading today. He shows as an image of a Spirit plunging deep into the infinite bowels of God where no man can tread and touching and feeling the most impenetrable aspects of the nature of God. Then, approaching the human heart–by contrast so superficial, so distracted, so finite, so petty, that Spirit dives into it, filling it to overflowing with the divine nature. Thus that little human soul is exalted far above and beyond its own natural limitations, and comes to know a joy that it couldn’t have dreamed of. And, it is gifted with an unexpected faculty to assist powerfully in the transformation of other souls as well.

This work of the Holy Spirit is the “pearl of great price” Jesus speaks of in the Gospel (cf. Mt. 13:46). It is to this action that He refers when He says, “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Cf. Lk. 17:21).

Nor does a shift to this rich understanding of Christianity require more complicated and esoteric theology. On the contrary, if anything, it requires a simplification of the heart vis-a-vis “Donut Christianity” or Christianity reduced to a rule book.

Still, today’s gospel does remind us that there is a price to pay for this pearl of great price. When we contemplate Jesus casting out demons, we have trouble relating. We admire Him for His divine power, but find little relation to our own lives,

Yet, Jesus teaches us elsewhere in the Gospel that to the extent that a soul is not filled with the Holy Spirit, it is occupied by other spirits (cf. Mt. 12:43-45). Perhaps this is not demonic possession strictly speaking–but to the extent that we are attached to creatures, self, sin, fear, to that extent, real, hellish, living demonic spirits have a stranglehold on us. And extricating the barb that is injecting the venom of sin into us is a costly process indeed, which involves discipline and even some suffering. And militant consistency in daily prayer, where we insistently and recklessly abandon ourselves to God’s love and Providence, holding nothing back.

But it is so worth it–not just to avoid the ruin of ourselves, but to attain that pearl of great price. That pearl of God’s full possession of our hearts is so disproportionate to what we sacrifice, that it is almost unjust. God could have chosen simply to fill our nature with happiness in proportion to that nature’s own limitations. But the joy He gives us surpasses that natural happiness as far as His infinite nature is above our own.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask the Lord insistently not to hold back His demands from you, in the face of your weak freedom. Tell Him with all your heart that you give yourself wholly to Him, and beg Him to send His Spirit to push out your sin, fear, and attachments, so that He can take full possession of your heart and fill you with the joy that no tongue can describe.

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