command to love
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The Command To Love

Every Mass begins with a prayer called the “collect.” The priest prays it right before the day’s readings. While it may slip by us sometimes, it’s good to pay attention. It typically gives us a “clue,” if you will, as to what we should pay attention to during the Mass.

The collect for today’s Mass begins: Almighty ever-living God, increase our faith, hope and charity, and make us love what you command…”

Make us love? That seems odd. Can we be made to love? Isn’t love an emotion, something we have little control over? How can we be commanded to love?

It’s true that our culture wants us to think that “love” is a warm, fuzzy feeling that we have little or no control over. “The heart wants what the heart wants,” right? We can’t help who we fall in love with. And yet, Jesus commands us to love. John 15:17 could not be more clear: Love one another as I have loved you.

Love, for Christians, is not a feeling. Feelings come and go, are not always rooted in reality and can lead us down the wrong path very quickly. How many of us have “fallen in love” with a person who does not have our best interests in mind? What about falling in love with someone we barely know, but with whom we’ve shared an intense event?

No, love is not a feeling, but an action. It is a decision. Further, it is a decision to put the needs of someone else before our own. Deacon Keith Fournier, talking about the foot-washing of Holy Thursday:

The Love of Christ is made into symbolic action, because Love is a verb. Love is a command, a mandate. This foot-washing is more than a re-enactment; it is an invitation to participate in the ongoing redemptive mission of Jesus Christ through His Church.

The Eucharist is the “Sacrament of Love”, in the words of our beloved Holy Father Benedict XVI. In that first Encyclical letter he underscored not only the depth of the Mystery revealed in that penultimate Sacrament, but he also connected that Sacrament – and our participation in it – to our choice to live lives of love in the real world.

Sometimes love requires us to do very difficult things: to confront a loved one who is enmeshed in addiction, to stand at the bedside of a dying friend, to discipline a teen who screams, “I hate you!” No parent wants to get up at three a.m. to tend to a terrified toddler who’s had a nightmare. The saints stand as example: choosing to care for the destitute and dying, the leper, taking the place of one slated to die. There is no romantic feeling when we ourselves are in pain and choose to offer up our suffering in union with Christ’s.

Christ can command us to love because love is a choice. In his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love), Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI takes up the question of being able to love upon command.

The love-story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God’s will increasingly coincide: God’s will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself. Then self- abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy (cf. Ps 73 [72]:23-28).

Love of neighbour is thus shown to be possible in the way proclaimed by the Bible, by Jesus. It consists in the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know. This can only take place on the basis of an intimate encounter with God, an encounter which has become a communion of will, even affecting my feelings. Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend. Going beyond exterior appearances, I perceive in others an interior desire for a sign of love, of concern. This I can offer them not only through the organizations intended for such purposes, accepting it perhaps as a political necessity. Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave.

“Seeing with the eyes of Christ:” this is how we are able to love upon command. We abandon our wishes, desires and needs and instead put the other first. We see them as Christ sees them: God’s creation, imbued with dignity and worthy of our time, our help, our love.

Love is a choice; God never forces us to do anything. We are free creatures. But if we follow Christ, we must follow his commands and He commands us to love. We choose to love “in the real world,” as Deacon Fournier says: that world of death, angry teens, broken relationships and sin. We love – not as a feeling – but as action, acting as Christ would, seeing others with his eyes.

Today, let us pray with the whole Church: Almighty ever-living God, increase our faith, hope and charity, and make us love what you command…” Let us choose to love.

holy thursday
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Holy Thursday: Night of Sacrifice And Service

With Holy Thursday, Lent ends and the Church enters into the Triduum: Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil. This is the holiest time of the year for Christians. We enter into the eternal sacrifice of Jesus Christ, celebrate the Last Supper, walk with Him through the Passion and anticipate the Resurrection.

Holy Thursday is the most complex and profound of all religious observances, saving only the Easter Vigil. It celebrates both the institution by Christ himself of the Eucharist and of the institution of the sacerdotal priesthood (as distinct from the ‘priesthood of all believers’) for in this, His last supper with the disciples, a celebration of Passover, He is the self-offered Passover Victim, and every ordained priest to this day presents this same sacrifice, by Christ’s authority and command, in exactly the same way. The Last Supper was also Christ’s farewell to His assembled disciples, some of whom would betray, desert or deny Him before the sun rose again.

The Holy Thursday liturgy is one of sacrifice and service. The Gospel (from the Gospel of John) tells of Jesus washing the feet of His disciples in an act of service. He then instructs them to do the same. This Gospel then comes to life: the priest washes the feet of 12 people from the church congregation. It is an act of humble service, an example of the Christian life.

The liturgy moves then to the Lord’s Supper. Jesus and his Apostles were celebrating the Jewish Passover, a night that recalls the angel of death passing over the Jews in Egyptian captivity as they prepare to flee to freedom. The unleavened bread was necessary; there was no time to wait for bread to rise with yeast. Jesus takes this covenant, the promise between God and the Jews, and transforms it into the New Covenant, the promise of salvation and the triumph over death for all who eat and drink His Body, His Blood, in faith.

The end of the Holy Thursday liturgy is sober. After Communion, the Eucharist (which usually is held in repose in the Tabernacle) is moved and the Tabernacle stands empty. By now, Christ has been betrayed by Judas and is under arrest. The empty Tabernacle reminds us that Christ has been taken away. (The faithful then spend time in Eucharistic adoration; the Eucharist is typically moved to a temporary chapel.) In this way, the faithful “keep watch” with Jesus through the night.

The altar is stripped. The church takes on an empty, somber tone. Some churches follow the tradition of covering the crucifix and statues with a purple cloth. In essence, we anticipate our Lord’s Passion and the suffering of Good Friday.

Our faith offers us such rich, bountiful liturgical celebrations in the Triduum. Catholics and non-Catholics often refer to the “smells and bells” – incense, bells, music, and there is truth to that. Catholics worship with our whole bodies. Our senses are fed; we bow and kneel. We sing and process. We eat and drink. It is not a mere cerebral experience. We are not a quiet and polite audience to a theological discourse. No: God created us body and soul, and we return that gift by worshiping Him with our whole being.

The Holy Thursday liturgy abounds with symbols, examples of sacrifice and service, and yes, “smells and bells.” It is an opportunity to worship in a manner given to us only once a year. By all means, take advantage of this time to grow closer to Christ, our Lord and Savior.

Holy Week
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10 Quotes For Holy Week

With the celebration of Palm Sunday, we enter Holy Week. Hopefully, this will be a time of peace, reflection, penance and prayer for all Christians. Here are 10 quotes for you to ponder as we prepare for the Passion of Christ.

  1. We give glory to You, Lord, who raised up Your cross to span the jaws of death like a bridge by which souls might pass from the region of the dead to the land of the living. We give glory to You who put on the body of a single mortal man and made it the source of life for every other mortal man. – St. Ephrem of Edessa
  2. Ultimately, in the battle against lies and violence, truth and love have no other weapon than the witness of suffering. – Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI
  3. Do you realize that Jesus is there in the tabernacle expressly for you – for you alone? He burns with the desire to come into your heart. – St. Therese’ of Lisieux
  4. Be assured of God’s love for you. Seek by his grace to heal the damage of sin. Seek communion with him and with those who make up his Church and those who are not yet within. His love for all of us is unconditional. His joy is infinite. His mercy overflows. – Deacon Michael Bickerstaff
  5. The washing of the feet and the sacrament of the Eucharist: two expressions of one and the same mystery of love entrusted to the disciples, so that, Jesus says, “as I have done… so also must you do” (Jn 13: 15).  – St. John Paul II
  6. “We adore you and we bless you, Lord Jesus Christ, here and in all the churches which are in the whole world, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.” – Stations of the Cross
  7. Through the stark and solemn Liturgy of the Friday we call “Good”, we stand at the Altar of the Cross where heaven is rejoined to earth and earth to heaven, along with the Mother of the Lord. We enter into the moment that forever changed – and still changes – all human History, the great self gift of the Son of God who did for us what we could never do for ourselves by in the words of the ancient Exultet, “trampling on death by death”. We wait at the tomb and witness the Glory of the Resurrection and the beginning of the New Creation. – Deacon Keith Fournier
  8. The Cross is the word through which God has responded to evil in the world. Sometimes it may seem as though God does not react to evil, as if he is silent. And yet, God has spoken, he has replied, and his answer is the Cross of Christ: a word which is love, mercy, forgiveness. It is also reveals a judgment, namely that God, in judging us, loves us. Remember this: God, in judging us, loves us. If I embrace his love then I am saved, if I refuse it, then I am condemned, not by him, but my own self, because God never condemns, he only loves and saves. – Pope Francis
  9. No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown. – William Penn
  10. Awake, thou wintry earth – Fling off thy sadness! Fair vernal flowers, laugh forth Your ancient gladness! – Thomas Blackburn, “An Easter Hymn”
Holy Week
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An Illustrated Guide to the Triduum

This coming Sunday, we celebrate Palm Sunday and with that, enter into Holy Week. Let us begin to prepare for this most blessed time of year.

For Catholics, the three days prior to Easter Sunday are known as the Triduum. These days are truly holy; they bridge Lent and Easter by allowing the faithful to follow the last days of Jesus’ life. The Triduum are full of symbols, special prayers and music, and unique ways to pray as the universal Church. FOCUS.org has created this Illustrated Guide to the Triduum to help us understand all we see and do during the liturgies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil.

Illustrated Guide to Triduum