Amor Meus Crucifixus Est

Greetings, Friends! Today I invite you to love. Listen to the tender voice of Our Blessed Savior, the Word-Made-Flesh. He restores us to our inheritance by dying on the cross.

His mercy is unbounded and the gifts He shares with his adopted children are infinite. While most men look for glory and power, He leads us down the Royal Road of the Cross to establish peace. He never forces Himself on us and is always ready to receive us when we repent. How do I know this? I believe in the promises of Scripture and the testimony of the Church, and I see the power of Divine Love in my own life and in those around me. If life is all about our relationships, let us firmly establish a relationship with Him as the foundation of every other relationship we have.

Consider how He treated the rich young man. This fellow heard about Our Lord and sought His advice. He asked, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" In chapter 18 of his Gospel, Luke tells us that Our Lord "looked at him and loved him".  The response of the divine Lord was not bereft of human consolation. Before He answered, Jesus gave the rich young man what his heart desired (even if he didn't realize it): love. Jesus didn't just tell the man to give everything away, but first met the desire of his heart.

It's likely that this is just one account of many interactions that Our Lord had with folks around Him. But consider the account of the woman taken in adultery and the woman at the well. Have you ever considered that Our Lord initially met the emotional human needs of those whom He encountered?

Imagine every day Our Lord is walking through the streets of Galilee or chatting with his disciples and apostles on the shores of the lake. Someone approaches, asks a question, and the response of Our Savior is to love him. Not just give a rote answer or speculate about the good life, but Our Lord loves the interlocutor. How did Our Lord announce His purpose? "I have come to heal the broken hearted."

How many times to we do that? How are we helping to heal the broken hearted? Let's personalize this, as I think that's the intent of the Gospel of Salvation: that we make it personal. When someone asks you about the Faith, do you give a sterling intellectual account of the Mysteries that we contemplate, or do you invite the person to love? Do you try to meet their legitimate emotional needs and invite them to a relationship, or is it just about the words and how much fun it is to talk about cool things?

We see how the apostles were called and that they left everything to follow Jesus, but they didn't really leave anything of value considering what they received: The found the source and fulfillment of all their needs: Love. We can have that, too! What did Saint John say in the Apocalypse?

"Behold I stand at the door knocking. Anyone who hears me, I will have supper with him and he with me." 

Here is He through Whom all things were made, just standing there waiting for us to open the door.

Let's consider the woodcut that appears above. My favorite images of the Crucifixion have people in them. Don't get me wrong; the bare crucifix on my rosary and in each room of my home is wonderful. But my favorite shows the dynamic relationships that Our Lord had and how they endured even unto His death. In the woodcut, their appears to be Our Lady and John the Beloved. Note that name: John the Beloved. Wow! We even have the souls among the dead pictured and some angels floating about. We see in brief the entire Communion of Saints, and the angelic helpers of the Mystical Body.

I invite, you then, to walk with my and my Savior. Today while we enter into our own reflections on the Paschal Mystery, remember it's all about Love. Let us share our faith with our friends. Let's remember that we don't convert anyone. That's the work of the Holy Ghost. We can do something great in our evangelizing, however: We can try to meet the legitimate emotional needs of people whom we meet.

Saint James saw this when he wrote in his epistle (2:16):

... and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?

Certainly, we need to share an intellectual knowledge of the Faith with others, but I've learned in the street evangelizing that I've done that people listen to the Word of God when I show them that I'm really quite concerned about their needs. Their own needs. When I take the time to love someone and truly understand where they are coming from, I see how God invites me to share His life with others by demonstrating in a real and personal way that I'm concerned about their good.

Consider, too, how Our Lord acted during His Crucifixion. He was still making friends, even as He died on the Cross: "This day you will be with me in paradise." He wasn't all neurotic and needy. He wasn't showing off for His mom and asking His best friend to prop up His ego. That's love. He didn't complain about how much work He'd done to get there, he simply continued His invitation to Love.

And so, beloved reader, please know that I offer my prayers and works of the day so that you and I can continue to walk with Our Lord and build a civilization of love so that all things might be subjected to the One who redeemed us and set our captive hearts free.

Let's work to invite others to walk with Our Crucified Savior. Let's never forget that the most important thing is love. Let me know what you decide. Nothing would please me more than to know that you're walking with us. Remember, you'll receive no condemnation from me; this is just a gentle reminder of the gift that can be ours.

If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts.

No Performance Standard

One of my favorite passages in the Gospels is found in Matthew 19:16-30 where the rich young man comes to Our Lord to ask what he needs to do to in order to be perfect. Pay particular attention to Our Lord’s response to this man. Some translations have it, “Jesus looked at him and loved him…” or “Jesus looked at him with love…” Before our blessed Savior responds to the man’s question, he loves him.

I hope my reader has had the experience of love on a human level. In human love one of our greatest experiences is the sheer delight of being with the beloved. “The lover seeks union with the beloved.” is an old saying but very true. Even in the pernicious relationships that only seem like true love, this desire to be with the other is all-consuming, we want to be united with the object of our desire, even if only physically.

The problem with human love, at least most of the time, is that we cannot perfectly love our beloved nor do we ever really feel perfect love from them. Human love tends to have restrictions and a performance matrix. Consider the first love of an adolescent. Warm feelings of tenderness usually come about from the physical appeal or the personality of the object of our love. And this is a good thing!

But when the object of our love falls short of our expectations, this merely human love can sometimes falter. It’s a little embarrassing to recount, but I remember having a crush on someone in middle school where she came to school on a Monday morning with a large pimple on her forehead. How hideous she was! Although she had several classes with me during the day and we frequently ate lunch with a group of our peers, I couldn’t stand to look at her!

The Divine Love, on the other hand, sees our pimples and still loves us. Even our defects and faults that are not clear to us are known to the Beloved, yet he still loves us. He desires the good for us and even works for that end. He loves us despite ourselves and works for us so that we can attain a likeness to His Son.

I used to think that God’s love for me was akin to my love for others, on a human level. On some deep emotional plane, I could not see that God loved me for who I am, for my personhood, that His love for me was the sustaining motion of my being. Despite my sins and numerous derelictions of duty, my Tender Savior was constantly reaching out his arms to hold me and sustain me.

There’s a kind of pride and inflated ego that operates in the soul of someone who thinks that he has to perform for God. To say that God’s love for us is dependent upon our fidelity to the Gospel is to hold out a performance standard for God’s love. But we’re told over and over in scripture that God’s love is unconditional.

For the rich young man cited above, St. Matthew doesn’t say, “Because of his prior fidelity to the Commandments, Jesus looked at him and loved him…” It doesn’t say, “Jesus, seeing the good works of the rich young man called him to perform more rigorously…"

St. Matthew says very clearly, “Jesus looked on him and loved him.” (Mk 10:21) Not because of what he had done in the past nor because of some estimation of what the man would do in the future, but merely because the rich young man was the object of His love.

If we read to the end of the story, the young man went away sad because he did not want to perform to the higher standard to which Our Lord was calling him, but the Gospel writers do not say that Our Lord stopped loving him. After the man left, he was still loved by God.

It’s true that Our Lord says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) But what the Sacred Text does not say is that if you’d don’t keep his commandments He will stop loving us. God loves even the demons in hell; the problem is that his love burns them because they do not accept it. Their refusal to cooperate with Grace is what makes them burn.

Let’s not make God’s love burn us. Let us pray for receptivity to God’s love, realizing that it is the basis for our conversion. I’m convinced that the chaos caused by scruples of conscience and the emotional pain we feel after we sin are the results of God’s love burning within us and calling us to greater conformity with His holy Will.

After we've accepted God's merciful love, let us share that love with others. Let's drop the performance standards that we set out for people and simply share God's love with them.

Praised be the Holy Name!