Word to the Wise
Sunday, January 28, 2007 - Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (St. Thomas Aquinas)
[Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19; 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30]So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
One of the most frequent questions asked of me at weddings is: Do you know how many weddings you have celebrated? No, I don't! But I can tell you this. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of them had the reading from First Corinthians as one of the scriptures. Although I haven't made a practice of asking couples to tell me what they think the meaning of that passage is, I think it would be a fascinating exercise over a period of time. One thing seems certain, St. Paul did not mean that passage just for married couples! He is telling the community to "strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts." Love is more than the bond of marriage. It extends to friends and strangers alike! That is what the parable of the Good Samaritan is all about. But, for the moment, I'd just like to celebrate the love of friendship, which I believe includes marriage but is not limited to it. January 28th is usually the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, the great and awesome Dominican theologian of the 13th century but also for all time. He has some wonderful things to say about the love of friendship in his SUMMA THEOLOGIAE: "Love is also itself a sort of unity, an attachment of heart which imitates unity of substance, relating the lover to a loved friend as to another self, and to what is loved with desire as to something belonging to him. And finally, love causes lovers to seek some appropriate real unity: being together, talking together, doing things together........ The beloved is constantly present in the lover's thoughts, and the lover tries to think himself into the beloved's very soul, in the way St. Paul says the Holy Spirit, God's love, searches even the depths of God." At all those weddings, I pray that the couple will look to that unity and transcend the terrifying individualism that our culture promotes as a human model. Without the love that sees the other as part of oneself, all marriage or friendship becomes merely a relationship of convenience, to be used and thrown away when it no longer "meets my needs." This kind of love is not the same as what Scott Peck refers to in his THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED as "cathexis" which is a strong mutual attraction. Some strong mutual attractions are very sick and dysfunctional and are anything but vessels of the Holy Spirit! The love that enables friends or married couples to persevere is one "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." Just as I am involved in the ceremonial celebration of marriage, I am also involved in those marriages which fail to last. I serve as a "Defender of the Bond in Second Instance" for the Appellate Tribunal of the Dioceses of Texas. I read case after case and wonder what was going on in that relationship that led to such bitterness and sorrow. Time and time again I can only see that whatever brought the couple together, it wasn't love. Whatever kept some of them in abusive relationships for years wasn't love. Yet, we cannot idealize love in such a way that it becomes impossible in our culture because of our individualism. Jesus accepted people as they were. He forgave when they offended. Indeed, he said that the way we treat one another is the way we treat him! He is a part of every person, and that indeed is what St. Thomas Aquinas points out: love makes us part of one another. We cannot hate someone else without hating ourselves! Getting beyond ourselves to considering someone else as just as important if not more important than ourselves is a big step. I am grateful to God for my friends because that is precisely what they teach me! AMEN
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