Saturday, December 31, 2005

Ready or Not, Here Comes 2006

I'm not going to make any New Years resolutions except to renew my resolve to follow the two greatest commandments as Jesus stated when the Pharisee's tried to corner him and trip him up. This is from Dr. Marcellino D'Ambrosio's website, The Crossroads Initiative. He is a Catholic, but also a Christian. I found this one time while searching the internet. I saved it on my computer and now is a perfect time to reflect on this again. It keeps my resolve simple when I tend to make everything complicated.

"They are at it again. They enlist a Pharisee to do what lawyers do best- ask a question designed to put a person on the hot seat. “Which commandment of the law is the greatest?” (Mat 22:34-40). If the law were only the Ten Commandments, this would be tough enough. But the written “Torah” included many more moral, ceremonial, and dietary prescriptions.

Jesus, of course, is a radical. A “radical” is one who goes to the “radix” or root of the issue. The root problem was that these Pharisees majored in the minors. They loved to strain out gnats and swallow camels. They missed the forest for the trees, going to great lengths to observe the letter of the law while totally missing its spirit.

So Jesus fires a broadside. Splicing together two passages from the Torah, he sinks them. “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all your mind” (Deut 6:5). “This is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Lev 19:18).”

This sinks them for a couple of reasons. First it brilliantly sums up the entire law because every single precept is an expression of these two commandments. Read the Ten Commandments (Ex 20:1-17) and you’ll see that the first three are about loving God and the other seven are about loving your neighbor. If you read every line of the Bible, you’d be able to put each command in column A (love God) or column B (love your neighbor). So these two commandments are indeed the root of them all.

But the other reason his answer sinks them is that these two root commandments are precisely the ones the Pharisees keep breaking. Observance of the law for them is not an act of divine worship but rather of self-promotion. Rather than their observance of the law leading to love of neighbor, it leads to scorn of neighbors who fail to live up to their standards (see how they treat the blind man in John 9:24-34). Note what Paul, the converted Pharisee, says: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal (1 Cor 13:1).” Paul knew this from experience–he spent years as a gong. On the positive side, St. Augustine says “love and do what you will.”

Yet Jesus did not say just to love. He said we must love the Lord with our WHOLE heart and soul and with ALL our mind and strength. I made a discernment retreat at the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemane when, at age 21, I felt torn between a desire for religious life and marriage. As I walked into the retreat house, I shuddered to see this phrase inscribed in the stone over the entryway: “God Alone.”

Does wholehearted love of God leave no room in your heart for a spouse or children?

If that were the case, there would be no second great commandment in this story. In fact Jesus says the second commandment is like the first. That’s because the kind of wholehearted love Jesus is talking about is charity (agape), which means loving God for his own sake and all others for his sake, and doing so not by human strength, but with the divine love that is poured into our heart by the Holy Spirit (Ro 5:5) When we love others with charity, we are loving God through them. Our every loving act towards them becomes an expression of our love for God.

So at bottom, the two great commandments are just two sides of the same coin. Jesus says to render to Caesar what is Caesars and render to God what is God’s. The two-sided coin of charity is the only legal tender we can use to pay the obligation that’s even more important than taxes–the one owed to the Creator."

How simple is that? I'd like to carry that coin in my pocket all the time. The Lord has blessed me with family and friends who love and support me (and sometimes make me nuts). But really, it's me who makes me nuts, by not keeping it simple. I wind up things in my mind until they are so complicated that I can't see my blessings. I am blessed to have a husband who loves me, a home that's paid for, a new car to drive, clothes to wear, food to eat and 2 little doggies to play with. I have a computer and the internet. I have a cellphone. Puhleeeez! I should never feel depressed and deprived. I probably complicated my life with the accumulation of too much in the way of worldly possessions.

Over the 50+ years of my life I have pack-ratted many "things". I hold on to fond memories of people and places by keeping things. When I look at or touch those things, I experience a pleasant memory. Too many of things clog up my mind so that all I have are past memories. It seems that I don't have space for new memories without letting go of some of the old ones. I want to make room for the new blessings so I guess I need to clean house. I need to honor important new memories by making room for them instead of holding on to the past.

Lord, guide me in your ways to open myself to new memories and blessings!



1 comment:

Diana said...

That's a really great post, Auntee. I have struggles with the same thing about holding onto old memories. Every time I would visit my old home in Huntington Beach I would be trying to resurrect those precious times. But actually being there and trying to almost relive them, made them slip further away. Hmph. It's like looking at a spec in the sky: look directly at it and you can't see it, but look to the side a little and there it is.

Or something like that. :)

Nanna Banana