Welcome to the latest edition of the weekly Say Yes to Holiness newsletter—designed to help inspire, encourage and accompany you on the path towards holiness.
We are now into the Thirtieth week in Ordinary Time. We are quickly nearing the end of the liturgical year, as next week we will begin the month of November and the celebration of all saints and remembrance of all souls. However, we still have a week ahead of us in which we can reflect and ponder upon Jesus’ response to the Pharisees as to what is the greatest commandment.
In a nutshell, Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is love.
Jesus roots his response in the Jewish understanding of God by quoting from the Books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus when He says, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
But then He goes one step further by saying, “The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
Wow. Jesus tells us everything God has revealed through the Law and the Prophets only will find its meaning and fulfillment in love. Not an emotional or sentimental love we see so often in our culture, but instead in a self-giving, sacrificial love that only seeks out the good of the other.
But these two commandments are not separate obligations.
Jesus reveals that each of these loves—love for God and love for neighbor are intricately and inseparably connected because we cannot truly love God if we are disregarding any of those whom He has created in His image and likeness. Additionally, our love for others will only find its deepest meaning when it flows out of our relationship with God.
Talk about challenging!
I know that we can focus so much on trying to figure out what God wants from us as we seek to discern His will, grow in virtue, overcome our weaknesses, and fulfill our responsibilities as disciples that we sometimes forget (or at least I do!) that the foundation of all our efforts is love. Without love, even our greatest growth to be faithful disciples will lose its spiritual significance.
So, this week’s Food for the Head, Heart, Hands and Feet will seek to inspire, encourage, and accompany us in understanding what it means to love God completely, and how we might allow ourselves to receive His love, extend His love to others through our daily actions, and make love the guiding principle of our lives as we continue on our journey towards holiness…
Food for the Head
"Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.” — Saint Thomas Aquinas
As one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Church, Saint Thomas Aquinas dedicated his life to seeking a deeper understanding of God and the truths of our faith. Yet despite his extraordinary intellectual gifts and accomplishments, he understood that knowledge alone could never bring us into the fullness of communion with God, and this is where his quote today can help us.
I most naturally come to know God through my head—what I know and understand, but what the Lord has taught me over the years is that He didn’t create us to merely to know about Him, rather, He desires for each of us to know and love Him.
There is an important distinction between these two things, and we must be aware of it otherwise we can study Scripture, understand Church teaching, memorize prayers, and become quite knowledgeable about our Catholic faith, but it all can lead to naught if we don’t allow that knowledge to transform our hearts.
And that is exactly what Jesus is trying to point out in yesterday’s Gospel.
The scholar who approaches Jesus is an expert in the Law. He knows the commandments and understands their importance. But Jesus’ response challenges him—and us—to recognize that the ultimate purpose of the commandments is not to simply be obedient to a set of rules, but to grow in our relationship with God and others. This is because the commandments are meant to teach us how to love.
The greatest commandment is the greatest because it begins with loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind so that we can be fully united with Him. Then, the more deeply we come to know Him, we are more fully able to love Him.
This weeks gives us an opportunity to examine whether our pursuit of knowledge of God is leading us into a deeper relationship with Him? Are we allowing what we learn through Scripture, prayer, spiritual reading, and the teachings of the Church to change how we think, speak, and act? Or are we simply accumulating knowledge without allowing it to transform our lives?
Because how much we know is not as important as how well we love.
This week, resolve to spend time each day reading and reflecting upon a passage from Sacred Scripture, asking the Holy Spirit not simply to increase your knowledge of God, but to deepen your love for Him.
Food for the Heart
"Those who sincerely say ‘Jesus, I trust in You’ will find comfort in all their anxieties and fears. There is nothing that man needs more than Divine Mercy—that love which is benevolent, which is compassionate, which raises man above his weakness to the infinite heights of the holiness of God.” — Saint Pope John Paul II
Saint John Paul II reminds us that before we can truly love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, we first have to receive the tremendous love He has for us.
Saint John the Evangelist tells us in his first letter, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). It is important to remember that God’s love is not something we earn through our accomplishments, good behavior, or even our efforts to become holy. Rather, God’s love is the very source of our existence and the grace that makes our growth in holiness possible.
This lesson has been a HUGE one for me on my own journey towards holiness because I will get trapped in thinking it’s about what I do, rather than how much God loves me, because how often do we forget to remember that God really loves us?
We’ll look at our weaknesses, failures, and sins and convince ourselves that we are somehow unworthy of His love (or at least I do!). And then when we compare ourselves to others, we become discouraged because we convince ourselves (with a little help from Satan!) that they are more faithful, more generous, or more holy than we are, and who am I compared to them?
Or we think we have to continually prove ourselves worthy of His attention and affection. But Saint John Paul II tells us that it is God’s mercy that raises us above our weaknesses and is is God who draws us toward holiness. How wonderfully freeing it was to realize that we do not have to become perfect before God will love us. Instead, by receiving God’s love and cooperating with His grace, we then gradually become the people God created us to be.
This is why trust is so essential to our relationship with God. When we truly believe that He loves us, then we will become more willing to surrender our fears, acknowledge our weaknesses, seek His forgiveness, and allow Him to transform our hearts. For once our hearts are transformed by His mercy, we then can extend that same mercy and love to others.
This week, resolve to at least 5 minutes each day reflecting upon God’s love and mercy for you. And if you are struggling with a particular weakness, failure, or sin, consider bringing it to Him in prayer and/or go to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation so that you may experience His healing love more fully.
Food for the Hands
“Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.” — Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
The idea of loving our neighbor can seem pretty pverwhelming sometimes, can’t it? How can I love the angry person who makes a rude hand gesture towards me while I’m driving, or the grouchy neighbor who is convinced that my tree is creating all the leaves in his yard? Or how about the person who cuts in front of us in the express line at the grocery store with definitely more than the 10 items allowed?
Well, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux gives us the way to live out the second greatest commandment Jesus gives us through her “Little Way”. The Little Way is exactly that—little. It’s a small sacrifice, a smiling look, a kindly word. But above all, it’s about doing it all for love of the other.
The beautiful thing in all this is that Saint Thérèse reminds us that holiness is not reserved for those who accomplish extraordinary things. Instead, holiness comes through the ordinary circumstances and responsibilities of our daily lives. Because what makes an action holy is not its greatness, difficulty, or visibility, but the level of love with which it is performed.
I don’t know about you, but this is VERY encouraging because most of us spend our days engaged in activities that seem relatively insignificant, don’t they? We prepare meals, complete household chores, go to work, care for family members, run errands, and interact with the people around us. Where is the holiness in all that?
Yet each of these ordinary activities provides an opportunity to love God by loving our neighbor.
What that knowledge does is that it helps us to choose to respond patiently when someone irritates us, or offer encouragement to someone who is struggling, or perform an unpleasant task without complaining, or take time to listen when we would rather be doing something else. All of these actions may seem small, but when undertaken out of love, they become profound expressions of our love for God.
But, there is another important dimension to Jesus’ commandment that we should not overlook. We need to love our neighbor as ourselves.
We have each been created in God’s image and likeness. Now, love does not require us to disregard our own legitimate needs or means that we should allow others to mistreat us. However, it does mean that we must respect the dignity of every person—including ourselves—to will what is truly the best for each of us.
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges of this commandment is that it requires us to move beyond simply having good intentions and begin expressing our love through concrete actions. Especially when those actions involve doing things that we do not like, can not change, did not choose, or do not understand.
But when we offer loving sacrifice, our love becomes God’s love in action and reaches its fullest expression, and is the Little Way that any of us can walk towards holiness.
This week, resolve to perform at least one deliberate act of love each day for someone in your family, workplace, parish, or community. Seek opportunities to make small sacrifices, offer encouragement, or extend kindness, especially toward someone you find difficult to love.
Food for the Feet
"Always be impartial and just in your deeds. Put yourself into your neighbor’s place, and him in yours, and then you will judge fairly . . . Frequently, therefore, examine your heart, whether it is so disposed towards your neighbor, as you would have his disposed towards you, were you to change places; for this is the true test.” — Saint Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, p. 22
I love Saint Francis de Sales because he wrote for people like you and me—ordinary lay men and women. And yet, he challenges us to consider whether our love for others is truly reflected in how we treat them.
It is super easy to love people who agree with us, appreciate us, and respond positively to our efforts. But it becomes much more difficult to love when we encounter people whose opinions, personalities, behaviors, or choices challenge our patience and understanding, doesn’t it?
Jesus certainly encountered that! Yet He does not tell us to love only those whom we find agreeable or deserving of our affection. He tells us to love our neighbor.
That means we have to love the difficult neighbor, the inconsiderate coworker, the demanding family member, the person whose beliefs differ from ours, and especially, we need to love those who have hurt or disappointed us.
Saint Francis gives us a practical way to grow in this kind of love by encouraging us to place ourselves in another person’s circumstances and consider how we would want to be treated. Another way of putting this is to take the time “to walk in someone else’s shoes.”
Seems easy, but it’s not because this practice requires humility. We must be willing to admit that we do not always understand the difficulties, fears, or struggles another person may be experiencing. The practice also requires patience because we have to resist the temptation to judge others according to our standards. Let alone standards that we may not be consistently applying to ourselves. But most importantly, it requires charity. It requires love because our goal is not simply to tolerate others, but to seek their genuine good.
Now, we don’t have to agree with everything another person says or does. Nor do we have to ignore mistakes or avoid difficult conversations because authentic love sometimes requires us to speak the truth, establish appropriate boundaries, or offer correction. But even in these situations, our words and actions should be guided by our ardent desire for the other person’s good—rather than by our feelings of anger, resentment, or our need to be right.
If we approach our relationships in the way suggested by Saint Francis, then we begin to discover that loving our neighbor is not simply about one responsibility among many. Rather, it becomes a way of living that shapes all of our encounters and interactions. And this is the way of love.
This week, resolve to identify one relationship in which you are experiencing difficulty or tension and ask God for the grace to see the situation from the other person’s perspective so you can take one concrete step toward greater understanding, reconciliation, or charity.
One of my favorite ways to grow in my capacity to love is by praying the Rosary. As you pray the Rosary this week, consider asking Mary to help you grow in your willingness to respond generously to the needs of others, especially when doing so requires you to set aside your own preferences or plans. To help you pray, check out the Daily Rosary podcast by the School of Faith.
Exhortation
“At the end of our life we shall be judged by charity.” — Saint John of the Cross
Saint John of the Cross offers us a powerful reminder of what ultimately matters in our journey towards holiness. Because at the end of our lives, we will not be judged according to how much wealth we accumulated, how successful our careers were, how many people admired us, or how many accomplishments we achieved. No, we will be judged by our love.
And that brings us back to yesterday’s Gospel in which Jesus gives us the two greatest commandments, and as He does, He shows us that love is not simply one virtue among many others, or another obligation within the Christian life.
Charity is the very foundation upon which the entire Christian life is built.
For everything we do as disciples should flow from our love for God and lead us toward a greater capacity to love others.
Our prayers should deepen our relationship with God and make us more attentive to the needs of those around us.
Our participation in the Sacraments should strengthen us to live more faithfully as witnesses to Christ.
Our pursuit of virtue should help us overcome the selfishness, pride, impatience, and resentment that prevent us from loving as Jesus loves.
And our efforts to serve others should always be rooted in our recognition that every person we encounter has been created in God’s image and likeness.
Yet perhaps the greatest challenge of these commandments is that Jesus does not ask us to love God and neighbor only when it is convenient, comfortable, or easy.
He asks us to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind.
To do that, we must seek to continually move beyond our natural tendency to place ourselves at the center of everything. It demands that we surrender our pride, set aside our selfishness, forgive those who have hurt us, and generously offer our time, talents, and resources for the good of others.
Now, this may seem impossible.
And for us alone, it is. But God never asks us to do anything on our own.
Rather, God offers us His grace and His mercy. He gives us His strength through prayer, Scripture, and the Sacraments, and His Church. Bottom line, God gives us everything we need.
So, this week, perhaps the most important question to is not simply whether we love God and our neighbor, and whether we are allowing that love to transform how we live. Perhaps the questions we need to ask are:
Am I becoming more patient, generous, compassionate, and forgiving? Am I more willing to sacrifice for others? Am I growing in my ability to recognize Christ in the people we encounter? Am I allowing my love for God become the guiding principle of all of my decisions and actions?
Those are the questions that help each of us recognize whether we are truly growing in holiness. Because ultimately, the journey ia all about becoming more capable of loving like God does.
May each of us do WHATEVER IT TAKES to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, so that through our faithful discipleship and growth in charity, we may one day stand before the Lord and together tell the Master of Death, “NOT TODAY!”
All the best,
Christina
PS—Make sure to check out my latest book, Solving the Parish Puzzle: One Person, One Disciple, One Leader at a Time. It is available for purchase on Amazon.
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Latest episode of the Say Yes to Holiness podcast...
Episode #267
“Where Wonder Leads: Finding God Through Story and Imagination--1:1 Conversation with Author Eric Clayton”
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Episode #267
“Where Wonder Leads: Finding God Through Story and Imagination--1:1 Conversation with Author Eric Clayton”
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Update from The Catholic Leadership Puzzle
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Solving the Parish Puzzle is now available as an Audiobook on Audible!
Have Christina guide you through her latest book!
After several months of work, my latest book, Solving the Parish Puzzle, One Person, One Disciple, and One Leader at a Time, is now available as an audiobook on Audible!
Just like the book itself, the audiobook allows me to personally guide you through the concepts of the book, and share why so many parish renewal efforts are falling short despite good intentions, dedicated leaders and numerous programs.
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