Ordo Amoris

Quinquagesima
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  I try to communicate accurately as much as I can, though I do sometimes err.  As a third order Dominican, the truth occupies a special place in my life and in my interactions with others.  When I make decisions, I try to have all relevant information that I can, to help me arrive at the right decision for a particular circumstance.  The more accurate information I have, the better decisions I can make, whether for the immediate present moment or even for the future.
    But truth, while greatly important, should not occupy the highest priority in our life.  St. Paul tells us that love, or charity (that type of love that reflects the love of God) is what is most important.  God could have given you special charisms, like speaking in tongues or prophecy.  You could know everything.  Your faith could be so strong that you, as our Lord said, move mountains or trees.  You could be the most generous person alive, giving away all that you have to the poor.  You could even offer up your body.  But if you do not love, all of that counts for nothing.
    What a good gut check!  How easy we can find it to do the right things.  We check off the lists of the precepts the Church asks us to follow: we go to Mass; we give money to support the parish; we pray daily; we abstain from meat on Fridays or do some other penance.  But even if we do all those things, if we do them without love, there is no merit for us.  All our daily deeds are like dehydrated food.  They have what they need to sustain us, but we need the water of love to rehydrate the food and make it edible once more.
    What many Catholics struggle with today is understanding what love is.  So many people, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, do not understand love.  They reduce love to an emotion or a desire.  They make non-sensical statements like “love is love.”  Or they react like children who want candy from the check-out line and say that if we really loved them, we would let them do whatever they wanted.  But that’s not how St. Paul describes love.  Love doesn’t seek after itself.  If I do not display patience with another, I’m not loving that person.  If I’m only looking out for myself, I’m not loving.  If my desires are perverse and contrary to nature, I do not desire love.

    Recently, our Vice President mentioned a teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas: the ordo amoris or order of love.  He referenced it in regards to the ongoing immigration debate.  I’m going to side-step the immigration debate, and simply focus on the ordo amoris, which will hopefully help you decide how best to implement what is most loving.  If you want the actual and full treatment from St. Thomas Aquinas, you can go to the Summa Theologiae, the Second Part of the Second Part, Question 26.
    The general order of love is: God, self, neighbor.  We then further delineate neighbor into family, city, country, and world.  We should love God above all else.  We owe everything to God as our Creator, and the first commandment our Lord gives us is to love God with all of who we are (and He cites the Book of Deuteronomy).  The second law is that we should love our neighbor as ourself.  But to love our neighbor as ourself, we have to love ourself first.  Love of self can be sacrificed for a higher good, the love of God, as we see in martyrs, or in parents for their children, but we need to have a proper love of self.  Lastly, we love others after God and self, based upon how close they are to us.  Generally speaking, the closest to us are family members, then members of our community, then other people.
    If we follow this to its natural conclusion, it makes perfect sense.  If I didn’t believe that there are priorities in love, then I might skip Mass on Sundays to spend time with a friend playing basketball or drinking bourbon.  Or if I don’t have a hierarchy of loves, then when I give money to charitable contributions, I should give the same amount of money I spend on groceries each week to each of the following: my parish; my Diocese; my local food pantry; the homeless shelter; each religious order that exists; each food pantry that exists in the US; each homeless shelter that exists in the US; every orphanage around the world; every charity around the world; etc.  Of course, that would lead to poverty, and the family would lack necessary goods, to which they have a right, while others, who are not even known to us, would receive the same financial support.  

    The Holy Father rightly brings up the parable of the Good Samaritan as our Lord reminds us to care for our neighbors who are not like us.  The Samaritan had no family or even national connection to the man left for dead.  But the man on the brink of death was close to him, and the Samaritan could do something at that moment to help the man, without neglecting any of his other legitimate responsibilities.  The man was in immediate need of assistance, and so, even in the ordo amoris, the Samaritan, like the priest and the levite before him who failed, had a duty to assist as a way of expressing love.
    The Scriptures also challenge us to remember that love of God cannot fully be divorced from love of neighbor.  St. John writes in his first epistle: “whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.”  Love of God, strictly speaking, does outweigh love of neighbor.  I should be more concerned with what God thinks of me than what my friends or family think of me.  However, more often than not, we show God we love Him by loving the people He loves, that is, our neighbor.
    The argument of modern society is that we should love everyone equally.  To the extent that we generally will good for all people, that is true.  But we cannot, strictly speaking, actually love every single person on this planet equally, because we have closer ties with some than with others, and the resources by which we show our love are limited, even while love is not limited.  So we should order our loves, putting God above all else, then myself next, then my neighbor, and my neighbor starting with my family, then my friends, then my other communities both locally and internationally.  I also have to order my love so that I deal with what is in front of my face: the rich man had a duty to care for poor Lazarus because Lazarus was at his doorstep and needed the rich man’s help.  
    But we also have to understand what love is and what love is not.  Love is not just a feeling, or license to do whatever we or another want to do.  Love means willing the good, for ourselves and for others.  If we allow a person to do that which is harmful, or if we want to do something which is harmful, we are not loving.  
    We could do so many good things, or have so many spiritual gifts.  But love, willing the good of the other, has to undergird all of what we do.  Otherwise all of our good deeds and actions are worth nothing.  If we ever have a question about how love looks, then gaze at the crucifix.  Because that is the greatest example of love: to lay down one’s life for God and for neighbor.  If our actions connect us to the cross of Christ, then there is good chance that they are truly loving actions, and therefore join us to the God who is Love: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Proven by Testing

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Aerial picture of the house that exploded

    On Monday, 22 November 2021 just before 9:30 p.m., I was preparing to got to bed in my old rectory at St. Pius X parish.  All of the sudden I saw a large flame down the road, felt the house shake, and heard a loud boom.  The house not even a block away from the rectory had exploded from (we later learned) a natural gas leak from a faultily-installed appliance.  
    As a chaplain with the Michigan State Police, much of my training has been for emergency situations.  But, up to that point, I had never been on my own in the case of a real emergency.  I always had Troopers who would take the lead, and I would try to assist them with what they said I needed to do.  
    After I saw, felt, and heard the house explode, I said, “Lord, have mercy!”, called 911 to give any information I had, and then rushed to get my State Police jacket on, find my flashlight, and run to see what had happened.  As the fire engines from Flint Fire Department started to arrive on scene, I then started directing traffic so that emergency vehicles could get access to the scene.
    Often, we don’t know what we will do unless we are tested.  If we are wise, we make plans for disasters, or maybe we just daydream about scenarios where we are the hero, but until that situation arises in our life, it’s just theory.  When life throws a situation at us where we need to react, we find out if our planning or our daydreaming was just wishful thinking, or if we really could respond in a heroic way to a life-changing event.
    The same is true in our faith life.  In order to find out our true physical strength, we have to test our muscles and put them under pressure.  In order to find out our true spiritual strength, and what virtues we have, by the grace of God, cultivated in our life, we have to be in situations where we can choose virtue or we can choose vice.  It doesn’t matter if we think we are a saint and we would never choose evil.  Only when we are in a situation when we can choose either to do good or to do evil do we really learn how much we value following God’s way rather than our own, or the way of the world.  
    Take, for example, being put into a situation where we have done something wrong, maybe even something small, but someone notices and asks us if we are responsible.  Maybe we even have friends around us to add to the situation with some peer pressure.  When asked if we did something wrong, would we tell the truth, or would we lie?  The lie may seem easier, and may, whether for a short or even a long time, keep us out of trouble.  But we know that lying is wrong, a sin against God who is truth.  So what do we do?  It is so easy to fold under the pressure, and give in to what we think will be easier and cause less punishment for us.  Maybe we even convince ourselves that it’s not that bad, or that we can do so much more good if we are allowed to lie in just this one case.  But, of course, if we start to lie now, we are more likely to lie later.  And a basic principle of morality is that you cannot do evil to achieve a good: it makes the whole scenario evil.
    In the upcoming forty days of Lent, we will test our spiritual muscles out again.  Our acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving (or the lack thereof) will tell us exactly what kind of fruit our life of grace has borne thus far.  When faced with a spiritual struggle, our true mettle comes out, what we are made of, and we learn where we need to grow in following Christ.  God reveals to us our shortcomings, not to beat us up with them, but to help us to know the ways in which we need to open ourselves to His grace to be better followers of Christ.  God gives us this special time to turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel so that we can rejoice even more in the new life that Christ won by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, and live that new life ourselves.
    Our catechumens who will be sent today by us to the Rite of Election, will also be tested in these weeks of Lent.  In the scrutinies, the Church will ask them to review their own life and put behind them all that does not conform to Christ.  They will reflect on how much their thirst for the new life Christ gives; on the areas of their life in which they are blind to sin; on the death that sin has caused in their lives.  But it won’t end there, just as Good Friday is not the end of the story.
    Because God wants to help us through these trials.  We cannot grow in holiness on our own.  Without God’s grace, we have no chance to live a holy life.  So as we grow in awareness through our trials, don’t be afraid to call upon God and ask for the help that we each need to live the new life of Christ.
    Until we are tested, we don’t really know how we would react.  May these upcoming Lenten days test us, show us our shortcomings, and open us to the grace and mercy of God who strengthens us to follow Christ on his pilgrimage through the desert.  May we allow God’s grace to make us bear good fruit as we remove the splinters of sin from our lives.