Each Thursday I make a visit to the various classrooms in our school to answer questions from the students. These questions range from something as simple as my favorite color to something more complex such as explaining the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist. Recently, our first grade class has been transfixed upon the concept of creation. Therefore, I undergo a battery of questions such as: how did God create trees, how did God create the ocean, how did God create animals, how did God create us, and this list goes on and on. To each of these questions I give the simple answer that God created us out of love and therefore everything which He has created is related to that love.
If we think about it God did not have to create us and yet He did because God is love. This Love which is known to us as God is a love which is infinite and flowing over. In the Baltimore Catechism the question is asked, why did God create me? The answer is given: “God made me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him in the next.”
Now that we know this infinite reality that is God’s love we ought to desire to enter into this love to the point that we share this same love that we receive with others. There are some who claim that they love their neighbor, but have no use for love of God. There are others who claim to love God, but fail to love their neighbor. We cannot love God if we fail to love our neighbor and we cannot love our neighbor if we fail to love God.
If you think concerning the complexity of the Law with its some 600 commands in the Law of Moses, Christ makes things pretty simple, and yet so difficult and we are thus instructed: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
As we look ahead to next Sunday we glance into the lives of the Saints as we come to celebrate All Saints Day. These are the many holy men and women who walked this earth, died in the state of grace, and are now in Heaven. Of them we can say that they came to love God and shared this love that they received with others not for their own gain, but for the glory of God. We build up so many idols for ourself which lead us away from love for God and our neighbor. As Saint Paul came to say in our Epistle: “so that you became a model for all the believers.”
The saints truly serve as models for us for they teach us to love God and neighbor. I encourage each of you to study the lives of the saints and to strive to be like them. If we strive to be like them then we are striving for the Kingdom of Heaven. If we strive for the Kingdom of Heaven then we are striving to enter into that abundant love of God which transcends all things. It is from the abundant outflowing of love that we are sent forth to share with others.
When we consider vice and sin we can see how things such as these do not lead us to love of God nor do they lead us to love of our neighbor. Instead falling into such realities lead us away from God and lead us towards abusing our neighbor for something other than love. If we desire to be saints then we must be willing to enter into this Divine Love by being willing to let go of such realities in order that we may live for the greater glory of God like the saints who have gone before us into life eternal. If this be true we must ask ourselves what we are willing to strip away to grow in this love and what we want to latch onto despite it detracting from that love. Hopefully there is nothing that is more important for us than growing in our love for God and our neighbor.
