Inside or Outside

Day's Saints
Joseph Calasanz, Benedictine

Gospel Mt 22:34-40
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together, and one of them,
a scholar of the law, tested him by asking,
"Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"
He said to him,
"You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."

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Whether in the storm or looking at it
from outside, it is astonishing to see.

Stormy weather has passed us by several times in the last few days. Tropical storms or their remnants have brought cool cloudy weather and some rain. A great deal more rain is needed in places where drought has taken hold amid horrendous heat. The smoke is damaging to the bodies of those forced to breathe it. My own trouble breathing has been exacerbated by it. While not incapacitated by the smoke, 

it has not been helpful.

All this is the result of changes in the atmosphere brought on partially by human activities and partly though the Will of God wishing to get our attention. While there might still be time to avert something far worse, there is very little time left.

Jesus quoted the Scriptures to those who questioned Him. "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart." It is the same thing that has been said before about abandonment to God and the embrace of His Will so that there is nothing of this world that is in the place where Jesus should be. Detachment is necessary to endure or enjoy the Heaven to come.

Wherever you meet resistance to God in your own being or in the world about you, you come face to face not only with evil, but the conflict that can be deadly, trying to give yourself to Him in spite of temptations and the seductive pleasures at odds with the spiritual ideal of Jesus.

In order to help us do penance and deliver us from our own attachments to the things in the world, He is giving everyone an impetus to do what we should and which He has commanded.

God loves us, and because He does, we love one another. There is nothing sweeter than the pure love of a child for his parents, and even a pet cat or dog will love us because that is its function, and such animals will do anything they can to awin our love. How much more should we love the Lord. There is no room for half-hearted love of God, or indifference. Either we love Him completely or we do not love Him at all. It is a hard and bitter lesson to learn, but it echoes what He said about a rich man having a harder time entering heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

I say all this only to remind you of what He has already told you personally. He gives Himself as fully as He can, and wishes you would reciprocate because in the balance, we stand about to be judged and to lose Him at the moment before we are done would be a terrible disappointment.

Judgement is God's sole prerogative, and not ours. We may judge when we should not, because our morality is in its childhood. The mature Christian learns to refrain from judging and does his best to help others avoid God's judgement. Neither presume someone is lost, nor that someone who is lost is saved. We do not know. The courage to ask Him God to tell us where we are deficient will elicit the graces necessary to grow and mature because it will lead to the revelation of God to us and us to ourselves, so that we can see His goodness. That jusdgement is upon the world right now. For some it will be terrible, crushing blow, and for others, it will be a moment of being freed to soar in God.