The Ladder

The week's readings have a theme: How to fall in love with God and with His son Jesus Christ.  Today's reading is a lesson in "tough love."  "If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:25-33)

The commentary I read (Living With Christ) notes that the reading asks, what we are willing to put in front of our love for God?  Whatever it is, we must hoist it on our cross and carry it, for it blocks our love for God. "Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple."

Our homilist (Fr. Dan) pointed out that the gospel highlights the hierarchy of love.  At the pinnacle (cf last Sunday's reading about the first commandment to love God with our whole heart and mind) is our love of God.  Every other love is secondary (or flows from it).  Secondary loves can block our relationship with God, and so we must move beyond them.

But to place and carry them on the cross is most difficult.

Paul advises (Phillipians 2:12-18) to "work out your salvation with fear and trembling." Salvation must be taken most seriously.  But we must also know that "God is the one who, for his good purpose, works in you both to desire and to work."  So we pray that God's desire will work itself out in our desires.  And we pray that our secondary loves, like Beatrice's love, will point us in the direction of the beatific vision that is the source of the highest love that transforms us. (Paradiso I, II).

As the Psalm says (Ps.27): "One thing I ask of the Lord; this I seek: To dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, That I may gaze on the loveliness of the Lord and contemplate his temple."

And so I pray to "Wait for the Lord with courage; be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord." Ibid.