Homily for November 3, 2024
Ordinary Time 31
A Command To Love God
If you
grew up in the ‘90s like me, you probably remember the movie “Richie Rich”,
starring Macaulay Culkin. The movie was about an incredibly rich boy who had
everything he could ever want – his own roller coasters, a McDonalds inside his
house, everything – but he didn’t have friends. So his butler decides to use
some money to “hire” friends for him. As it turns out, the kids enjoy hanging
out with Richie so much that they end up refusing the money, and they become
friends and have all sorts of adventures together.
I think
we can all admit that a friendship based on money isn’t a real friendship. For
love to be real, it must be free. Do you remember when you were younger and you
were at a family gathering, and your mom said, “Okay, now give Aunt Sally a hug”
– and you did it reluctantly, perhaps rolling your eyes. Clearly this means far
less than a hug freely chosen. So why, then, does God command us to love
Him? How is that real love? Can someone command us to love them?
God
commands us to love Him because He knows that loving Him is what makes us
happy. He gets nothing from our love – it’s not like He’s lonely or an
egomaniac. Rather, He recognizes that loving Him is precisely what we were made
for, and that our deepest happiness is to love Him.
But how
can someone command love? Doesn’t love rise spontaneously in our hearts?
Not always – because love is fundamentally a choice, and not a feeling. We can
take a natural, human love as an example. A married couple have committed
themselves to love each other – but this does not mean that they always feel
loving toward one another. Rather, it is a daily choice to lay down their lives
for the other, even when they don’t feel like it. One could say that their vow commands
them to love each other, because they freely entered into this love, so that
when the feelings wear off, they choose to love.
God’s
love for us features this same dynamic. I doubt that He had any affections or
delights in loving those men who were driving nails into His hands. No, He
endured the Cross because His love was complete self-gift – His only thought is
for us.
So, it is our duty to choose
love, even when we don’t feel it. What does that look like? Make choices for
Him. Decide to pray, even if it feels dry. Follow His commands, even if we don’t
understand them. As the saying goes, “Fake it ‘till you make it.” A wise
philosopher, scientist, and devout Catholic named Blasé Pascal, offered what he
called “Pascal’s Wager”. Part of this wager is the idea that if you don’t
believe in God or love Him, all we had to do was act as if we believed
and loved God – and He would grant us the grace to believe and love Him. This
should give us hope – if we choose to do loving actions, love will soon become
so ingrained in us that we will authentically love.
I was
recently reading about a reluctant musician from the Portland (Oregon) Orchestra.
Turns out she was forced to take violin lessons from her mom, and she hated
every minute of it. It seemed so dull to her – all that practicing and scales
and screeching. When she was 10, her mom wanted to help her love the
music, so Mom forced all her kids to start volunteering at the local orchestra.
The young girl hated it even more! She’d rather be out playing with her
friends. Finally, one day, the local orchestra was putting on a performance of a
piece by a musician named Corelli, which the girl had tried to play in her
private lessons and hated. But much to her surprise, when the first notes
started to play, she realized, Oh! So this is what this piece is supposed to
sound like! It’s beautiful! And she fell in love with music, having tasted
the rich beauty of a beautiful piece of music. She is now a professional violinist
in the Portland Orchestra.
Our
relationship with God can be much like that. We steep ourselves in the Word of
God, we attend Mass, we make pilgrimages to holy sites, we read the Lives of the
Saints, we hear beautiful Christian music, we go to Adoration and pray the
Rosary, go on a retreat. At first we may do these things out of obligation, but
it is likely that one or the other will stir our souls to a greater love for
God!
Which is
why it’s not enough merely to attend Mass. Of course, the Mass is the highest
form of prayer and worship, where we encounter Jesus in the Flesh…but the other
parts of our Faith minister to our hearts, our minds, our desire for happiness,
our craving to make our life meaningful. Diversify your prayer life and enrich
your life of faith, and you will experience His love.
Another important
corollary is that parents might have to command their kids to love God and bring
their kids to church, even if they object! Some parents say, “Oh, I’ll just let
my kids choose what religion to practice, if they practice one at all.” But do
we allow our kids to choose whether to go to the dentist or do their homework?
Of course not. We force them to do things that they may not enjoy, because we
know it is good for them – and because we are hoping to form the good habits that
will continue into adulthood. Likewise, raising our children to know how to pray,
to come to Mass weekly, and to live according to Christ’s teachings may not be
appreciated by your surly teenager or your hyperactive toddler, but it is
good for them and it inculcates faith deeply in them. It gives God a context to
work in their lives.
I think
of the great example of St. Raphael Kalinowski, a Polish man in the mid-1800s.
He was raised Catholic, reluctantly dragged to Mass by his parents. When he
went off to university, he fell away from the Faith and didn’t give God a
second thought. He became an Army engineer after college, during the time that
Poland had begun a war against Russia. He happened to be captured by the
Russians and sent to a salt mine in Siberia.
This was
a wake-up call for Raphael. Everything was stripped away – his career, his
family, his health – what would he turn to for strength and purpose? He began
to return to the faith of his youth. It had been so deeply ingrained within him,
even though at the time he was reluctant, but now it came back full-force. He
was able to survive ten years in Siberia due to his faith, and when he was
released, he was a holy man of God who became a Carmelite priest and a saint.
My
friends, this command to love God with all that we are is so important that our
Jewish brothers and sisters recite it every day. We too should inscribe it on
our hearts, that we may think about it daily. Whether we feel loving or we don’t,
we can still love God by choosing to love Him. In doing so, we will
eventually begin to sense His presence, and someday come to possess the Object
of our love, which is God Himself.
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