Category Archives: love

15th Sunday of Ordinary Time (B): Love and freedom from death, guilt and ego

14 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by in 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), care for others, death, ego, guilt, homily, joy, love

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“Return of the Prodigal Son” by Rembrandt
Saint Paul has written that God chose us in Christ in order to be full of love.  Here is where our religion begins.  It has been noted that the first Christians were just like the people around them: a mixture of rich and poor, weak and strong, male and female.  One could not tell the difference just by looking.  But, as a group, the Christians were noted for their care for others and for their joy. 

The original Christians were known for their taking care of others.  Especially others that the rest of society did not care for.  They buried the unknown poor, they cared for the sick.  They cared for the beggars.  Most of all, they cared for one another – sharing all so that no one was in need.  Many groups in history are known for power, strength, violence and bravery.  Few are known for how they loved each other.  This is the witness of our faith. 

Those first Christians were also known for their joy.  Joy is the infallible sign of God’s presence – it goes beyond happiness (which is having the world as we would have it) toward being in tune with the world as God would have it.  We find joy when we live as God would have us live.  

The first Christians shared all the conditions and struggles of life that their neighbors shared (and we still do).  We share the struggles, uncertainties and pains of this world.  Where then does our joy come from?  It comes from being freed to love and rejoice because, in Christ, we are freed from the three chains of death, guilt and ego.

We all fear death whether we acknowledge it or not and most of our sins come from this deep fear of diminishment, loss and ultimately oblivion.  But, as Christians, we know someone who once was dead and now lives.  We can boast, “Death, where is your sting?”

As Christians we are also freed from guilt.  We all know and bear this misery.  It is the felt knowledge that we have done what we should not and that we have not done what we should.  And even when we are not personally guilty of a specific sin we do share in the wholesale guilt of the human race.  And no human can forgive us, because we all share in sin.  But God can forgive and God has in Christ.  In Christ our guilt is wiped away – replaced by God’s mercy. 

Finally, the Christian is freed from the ego.  We are each both blessed and cursed by being a unique individual.  We can be so obsessed about taking care of ourselves and living in our own bubble that we forget others and forget the great mystery that it is only in dying to self that we rise to new life.  Through Christ we have learned that we save ourself by losing ourself.  Maturity comes when I realize that my life is not just about me.

In our care and in our joy we, as Christians, are known.  We love because, in Christ, we have been loved and freed from death, from guilt and from the ego.  This is the witness of our faith.  

See, how much these Christians love one another!  Hopefully, this will one day be said of our generation of Christians!     

Ascension Sunday: The concreteness of the Ascension

19 Saturday May 2012

Posted by in Ascension of Christ, love

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“The Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ” by Piotr Basin

Today, the Church celebrates one of its most concrete feasts – the ascension of Christ.  Throughout history there have been (and will continue to be, I am sure) Utopian dreams of a better world of tomorrow.  These dreams have been based on everything from the rise and triumph of the proletariat to the notion of a separated community of the enlightened to (one which is very much in vogue now) the undaunted belief in the sure progress of science.  These are the Utopian dreams that history has seen come and go.  They are often idealistic and based in a hoped for vision of tomorrow but today’s feast is different.  Where Utopian dreams are often ideological and abstract the ascension of Christ is concrete and sure. 

It is so because of the simple fact that it is not founded in some abstract principle or ideal but in the very resurrected body of Christ.  Christ is indeed risen which means he is risen body and soul, flesh and blood.  Anything less would not be fully and authentically human.  Christ ascends to the Father not just in spirit or thought but in the very concrete reality of his full humanity.  Throughout this Easter season in the Scriptures proclaimed we have heard Christ, time and time again, assuring his disciples that he is indeed present in “flesh and bone”.  This means fully present not just up to the moment of the ascension but in the ascension itself and now at the Father’s right hand.  From the day of the ascension heaven “began to populate itself with the earth, or, in the language of Revelation, a new heaven and earth began.”

In the ascension we truly realize that we are not orphans.  We are not left to the cold and cruel winds of chance, fate and odds or a history without direction.  Direction has been set.  The resurrected Christ (body and soul) sits at the Father’s right hand.  This, and nothing less, is our goal.  It is what we are meant for and what we are called to by God’s grace.

It is truly concrete and it is achieved and experienced concretely. 

In the gospel Jesus tells us that he is “the way” and the way, it turns out, is walked concretely.  The ascension is experienced again not in some abstract manner but in how we concretely treat and love the smallest and poorest brothers and sisters in our midst.  This, I have found, is a foundational understanding of the Community of Sant’Egidio which really is nothing more than discipleship 101.  When we love concretely we experience the ascension and we are brought toward the fullness of the future that God has prepared for us in Christ.

Let me share an example.  For three years now our Johnson City Community of Sant’Egidio has been taking sandwich bags every Monday to the John Sevier Center.  (The John Sevier Center is a low-income housing unit in downtown Johnson City.)  We do not go there as experts in anything.  We know we cannot solve the residents problems and struggles.  We just go and we are faithful in going and in this simple act of being present a human space is created both for the residents and for us.  We become friends.  We are brought a little bit further toward the fullness that awaits us all.  In this human space miracles happen and signs are given – demons are cast out and life is gained.  I have seen it for myself these past three years.

Christ bestows his love upon us.  We are meant to communicate it.  Love that is not communicated soon withers and dies. 

Love is lived not abstractly but concretely and it is in the concrete act that we are brought toward the fullness that awaits us all.       
      
    

"Let us love one another."

11 Friday May 2012

Posted by in Bishop Vincenzo Paglia, Community of Sant'Egidio, love

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In my own prayer, reflection and preparation for the Sunday homily I often consult, “The Word of God Everyday”.  This is the daily Scripture reflection book for the Community of Sant’Egidio.  The reflections are written by Bishop Vincenzo Paglia.  Below I have copied in whole his reflection for this coming Sunday, the sixth Sunday of Easter.  I find it to be very good and thought-provoking.  I hope that you do too. 

 “Let us love one another.” This is the imperative that the apostle John never tires from addressing to his community. He knows how important love is in the life of all disciples, because he learned it directly from Jesus and had a concrete experience of his love. He was able to taste Jesus’ sweetness, to see how radical and abundant his love was, as he even loved his enemies, even to the point of giving his own life as a gift. John was a privileged witness of this love, an attentive custodian and a caring preacher. In his first letter, he wants to unveil the nature of Jesus’ love and reveal its source: “Let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (1 Jn 4:7). The apostle speaks here of a love different from the one we normally understand. For us, love is a complex of sentiments that arises spontaneously from the heart, composed of attraction, kindness, desire, passion, self-gratification and satisfaction. To refer to this kind of love, the language of the New Testament employs the Greek word “eros.” The apostle, instead, uses the word “agape” to speak of the love that comes from God and that should govern the relationship between disciples.

To understand God’s love (agape) we cannot begin from our feelings or from our psychology, but from God. The Holy Scripture is the special document for understanding God’s love. It is, in fact, none other than a narrative of the historical event of God’s love for all of humanity. Page after page, in Holy Scripture, we discover a God who does not seem to find rest until he finds repose in the heart of each person. We could paraphrase the well-known sentence that Saint Augustine wrote about man and apply it to the Lord: “Inquietum est cor meum…” (trans. My heart is restless). Davide Maria Turoldo spoke of the “restless heart of God,” which descended to earth to seek out and save that which had been lost, to give life to that which had it no longer. It is a God who becomes a beggar, a beggar for love. In truth, while God extends his hand to ask for love, he gives it to humanity. God is the spirit that descends into the material; the light that penetrates the darkness to give life, to spiritualize, to elevate and to save.

This is Christian love: a God who descends freely into the trenches of the lives of all people to reach out to his beloved. Yes, God is restless until he finds us, until he touches our heart. And God was so restless “that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). God’s love, we could say, “is in descent”, it comes down to reach deep into the lives of all men and women with total devotion, “laying down his life for his friends,” as Jesus himself says. John continues to reflect in his first letter: “In this is love (Christian love), not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10). God is the one who loves first, loving even those who are unworthy of his love. God’s love, in essence, is entirely free. It is unjustified. God, in fact, does not love the righteous, but the sinners who are not worthy of being loved. Paul says that God chose the things that do not count for much so that they would count. God chose what was despised in the sight of men so that it would be an object of his grace (1 Cor 1:28). This is the God of the Gospels; a God who is moved by a love that seems attracted particularly by the absence of life and by the negation of love. God is a love that annihilates itself just to reach the most wretched of all people to enrich that person with its friendship. Jesus’ life is held within this very love. God, in fact, is not Being in itself, as understood in Aristotelian thought, but is Being for us, an infinite opening and passionate love for us.

If the entirety of Scripture is the history of God’s love on earth, then the Gospels are its culmination. Therefore, if we want to utter something about God’s love, if we want to give it a face and a name, we can say that love is Jesus. Love is everything that Jesus said, lived, did, loved, suffered… Love is seeking out the sick, it is having friends who are notorious sinners and Samaritans, that is, people who are considered foreigners, enemies and despised. Love is giving one’s life for all; it is remaining alone if needed so as not to betray the Gospel; it is having as a first companion in heaven a man condemned to death, the penitent thief… This is God’s love, which is entirely different from the self-love pounded into our psyche, from the ups and downs of our temperament, of our moods. The bonds of affection between people based on natural attraction are fleeting: it takes little to ruin and destroy them. It is now rare for people to have life-long relationships and difficult to understand relationships as definitive. Self-love, which exists more for personal satisfaction than for the happiness of others, is not strong enough to resist the tempests and problems of life. There are so many victims who fall down the weak and slippery slope of self-love. Only God’’s love is the solid rock that spares us from destruction, because before oneself, there is the other. Jesus gave us an example of this with his own life. He was able to say to his disciples: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love” (Jn 15:9).

The relationship between the Father and the Son is the model and source of Christian love. Certainly such a love could not come from us alone. We can, however, receive it from God. And, if we receive it, this love generates an abundant, universal fellowship that knows no enemies. It gives rise to a new community of men and women, where God’s love crosses over—even identifies with—the mutual love between people. One, in fact, is the cause of the other. A well-known Russian theologian used to love to say, “Do not allow your soul to forget this saying of the ancient spiritual masters: after God, regard every person as God!” This type of love is the distinctive sign of whoever is born of God. But this love is not a possession that one can acquire once and for all, nor is it the birth right of this or that group. God’s love does not know any limits or borders of any kind. It goes beyond space and time. It shatters every ethnic, cultural and national barrier. It even breaks through the barrier of faith, as one reads in the Acts of the Apostles when the Holy Spirit filled the house of the pagan Cornelius. Agape is eternal; everything passes, even faith and hope, but love remains forever. Not even death can break it for love is stronger than death. Jesus can rightfully conclude, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (Jn 15:11).