What Principles Guide My Life?
Pastor’s Column
31st Sunday Ordinary Time
November 3, 2024
“Hear O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone!
You shall love the Lord your God
with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your heart, with all your strength.
The second is this:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Mark 12:28-30
What are the guiding principles of my life? Christ makes it clear that if we put what is important to God first, God will guide everything else and we will be prepared for eternal life. If my life is not pleasing to God on the other hand, I will be like a shopping cart with a bent wheel, one that wants to go its own way, or perhaps like a pen that skips and blots and doesn’t write as it was designed to.
The Jews call the first part of this passage the great shema, which is Hebrew for hear. To this day pious Jews will sometimes place this text over a doorframe of their house (a mezuzah) or wear it on their wrists or foreheads in little boxes (phylacteries). How differently we might live if we were to read this scripture when first opening our cell phone or when getting out of bed! And what a great way to end the day: a brief review of how I loved God, and how I loved my neighbor (or didn’t!).
Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta once pointed out that it is much easier for us to love a “neighbor” who is far away than the one who is close by. It is wonderful to donate to charities that help the poor or distressed that we will never meet (like the gypsies in Slovakia that we supported so well), but the “neighbors” that are nearby can often be more problematic at times.
Prayer and Mass attendance are essential in the life of an active Catholic, but the only way we can know for sure that we love God is how we act when we leave church or prayer. Our “neighbors” are the mix of people in our lives through whom God works, often without our being aware of it: work, family, extended relatives, friends, people at church, acquaintances, and people we meet by chance each day (and especially the difficult ones). When you think about it, these interactions we have with such people are the primary vehicles by which we demonstrate our love for God in this world. In fact, our experience of heaven (how close we are to the Lord) depends precisely on how we treat others. We have heard once again what is most important to God, but will we remember?
Father Gary
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