Dear Parish Family,
Mother Teresa joins the saints of history in taking us to the heart of the Christian mystery. Each generation, GK Chesterton suggested, is converted by the saint who contradicts it most. He was referring to St Francis of Assisi. Pope Francis has captured in a single phrase the particular model represented by Mother Teresa for our time – that she is the conclusive response to what the pope has called “the throwaway society”. Mother Teresa picked up the throwaways and brought them within the folds of Christ’s love. When a British journalist asked Mother Teresa how she could keep on going knowing she would never be successful in her efforts to meet the needs of all those dying in the streets of Calcutta, she replied, “I am not called to be successful, I'm called to be faithful.” The perspective implicit in her response provides an answer to the ‘burnout problem’ of social service in a way that is also caught in this Sunday’s readings.
Everyone knows that Jesus summarized the Law of Moses in two commandments, love of God and love of neighbor. Many act as if simply doing the second one is the way to do the first. Today's readings beg to differ. They help us see that loving one another is not simply a matter of neighbor-directed good will. It is a matter of attending to the fact that God has first loved us. Though it is difficult to directly love God, whom “no one has ever seen” (John 1:18), loving one's neighbor starts somehow with responding to God's love.
The First Letter of John is straightforward in saying that the first move is God’s: “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another” (1 John 4:10-11). Finally, Jesus’ words in the Fourth Gospel tie that divine initiative more radically to Jesus’ laying down his own life.
The consequences of this teaching are eminently practical. One does not find the power to love one's neighbor simply by applying one's energy to service. One finds that energy for self-giving service by attending first to God's self-emptying love. That was St. Ignatius' strategy in helping people learn to love God in the Spiritual Exercises. Pay attention, he advised, to the gifts of God in your life; that will evoke a gratitude which in turn will give you the ability to pass on that love to those who most need it. Our faith in Jesus is haunted by the mystery of love. Perhaps this mystery itself is what causes us disquiet in our modern world. Love, after all, is not easily won, rarely found, and never really earned. It also leads to improbable situations like that of the prodigal son and the lost sheep and to forgiveness for dreadful sinners. The narcissistic and self-indulgent state of mind that passes for “love” in contemporary life and the great tidal wave of emotion associated with “falling in love” expose selfishness in the face of love’s greatest expression—to lay down one’s life for one’s friends—as the Passion of Christ demonstrates. The love revealed in Jesus, simple as it sounds, is terribly arduous. That is why the history of our faith and our culture so often reads like a history of our resistance to real love.
Fr. Tom Kunnel C.O.