Day 5
Loving with My All
I praise the Lord with you, because he is so great and beautiful a Love as to deserve the priceless gift of the whole person in the unfathomable depths of the heart, and in the concrete unfolding of daily duty through the various stages of life.
— St. John Paul II, Homily, February 2, 2002
The mere fact that you are participating in this Lenten Challenge — and have gotten this far — should fill you with deep, intense joy. It shows that you already desire the most important thing: to know, love, and follow Jesus Christ more fully every day. That desire is supernatural. You couldn’t have stirred it up on your own. Its presence in your soul shows without any doubt that God is with you and acting in your life. The engine of holiness is already humming in the depths of your heart, just as it was for the Blessed Virgin Mary. As the Preface of the Mass for Advent puts it: “ . . . The Virgin Mother longed for him with love beyond all telling.” Your longing to love God more fully, even if it seems to be a small or dim longing way down in the basement of your being, is in itself a movement of a very deep love for him, a love that gives him immense pleasure.
The deep longing for fulfillment, the yearning to come closer to Christ, is itself the work of Christ. He plants good, holy desires in the human heart so that he can later fulfill them. Through this longing, God is drawing you closer to his divine heart, where you will find more than you could ever have imagined, where your most intense desires will be satisfied to overflowing. As St. Thomas Aquinas put it when commenting on the fullness of love that the faithful experience in heaven: “Eternal life is the perfect fulfillment of desire; in as much as each of the blessed will have more than he desired or hoped for.”
Knowing that God is leading us to this glorious, indescribable destination should be an ongoing source of encouragement for all of us, as it was for St. Paul: “What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him . . . ” (1 Corinthians 2:9). We have that to look forward to.
A Precise Totality of Love
Jesus summarized our part in the fulfillment of this longing when he gave us the two great commandments. But fulfilling those commandments requires understanding them. What exactly was Jesus trying to tell us when he commanded us: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength”? This, according to our Lord, is the first and greatest commandment, which overflows into the second most important commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30–31).
We have two possible interpretations for the verse about loving God. First, Jesus may have simply been using many terms to say one thing: Love God totally! His use of the terms heart, soul, mind, and strength may have been simply a rhetorical device, a poetic way of expressing totality, emphasized by his fourfold repetition of the word all.
Yet, on the other hand, Jesus may have been consciously referring to the different powers of the soul when he listed those four modes of loving God. He may have meant exactly what he said, giving us clear instructions about what mature love for God looks like: it fills and overflows from the four main dimensions of human nature — the heart, the emotions, the intelligence, and the will.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. They actually complement each other. To love God totally means to love him with every fiber of one’s being. And that means integrating every sector of one’s life and every capacity of our human nature into a true friendship with Jesus Christ.
Beyond Self-Help Lists
The self-help industry tends to divide up the art of living. It promotes “five ways to become happy,” and “seven tricks to get ahead,” and “ten secrets to success.” This is not necessarily a bad thing. Lists like these often contain excellent advice. And in the face of real life’s real complexity, they provide a certain degree of clarity, order, and understanding. The Ten Commandments themselves follow a similar structure.
Yet, in the Christian tradition, the Ten Commandments have always been seen as guidelines that point out the bare minimum requirements for staying on the path to happiness. The essence of happiness goes beyond the bare minimum; it goes deeper. Full spiritual maturity can never consist in mechanically fulfilling a list of dos and don’ts. Jesus knows this. And so, without completely erasing the lists, he brings us to the deeper level, to a more unified vision.
Authentic love is the essence of happiness: loving God totally, with all the powers of our human nature, and expressing that love through concrete decisions in daily life, through treating others (God’s children, created in God’s image and likeness) with the same concern and proactivity that marks every person’s spontaneous attitude toward oneself.
Four Arenas of Love
Jesus chooses to describe this total love for God by referring to four separate arenas, so to speak, in which that love can be developed and grown and shown. This was no mistake. Three of the four terms Jesus uses were also used in the Old Testament; they formed part of God’s original revelation to Israel (see Deuteronomy 6:5). Jesus reiterates them. And so, surely they mean something. To penetrate this meaning will open up new possibilities in any Christian’s life, because it will show concrete ways to channel every Christian’s deep desire to love God more fully.
The following chapters will examine in depth each of these four arenas of love, showing how each of the four activates different powers built into human nature. Only by growing harmoniously in all four areas can we truly allow God’s grace to transform every corner of our lives, gradually discovering the abundant life that Jesus identified as the goal of his life’s mission: “I came so that they might have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).
Although we will examine each sector separately, it’s important to keep in mind that they are all connected. What happens in the emotions, for example, reverberates in the mind and the heart, and the direction of our heart affects our will and our emotions, and so on. The human person is a unified whole, even though our human nature does indeed have various powers and faculties.
Savoring the Promise
But before branching into the distinctions between heart, soul, mind, and strength, we should pause and take some time to savor the promise hidden inside this first commandment — the promise that God’s grace is working hard to bring us not merely to an earthly happiness that comes from following five secret tips, but rather to the full, glorious, and everlasting satisfaction of spiritual maturity. Here’s how Pope Benedict XVI portrayed that maturity in the context of describing the implications of our faith in Jesus. Notice how his expression seems to brim over with joy, energy, and optimism, which is how all of us should approach the great adventure of growing in God’s love:
Faith in the Lord is not something that affects only our minds, the realm of intellectual knowledge; rather, it is a change involving the whole of our existence: our feelings, heart, mind, will, body, emotions and human relationships. With faith, everything changes in us and for us, and it reveals clearly our future destiny, the truth of our vocation in history, the meaning of our lives, the joy of being pilgrims en route to our heavenly homeland.
Questions for Personal Reflections or Group Discussion
What idea in this reflection struck you most and why?
When did you first start experiencing a desire to know, love, and follow Jesus Christ more fully? Remember and savor that moment of grace.
What things in your life tend to encourage that holy desire, and what tends to drain it?
Think about the activities and commitments coming up in the next twenty-four hours. Which ones will be most threatening to the interior equilibrium that flows from loving God with your all? Think now about how you can react to those things more wisely.
- With someone I tend to get into arguments with, I will listen and ask questions to understand what he or she means before responding.
- With work I don’t enjoy but have to do, I will make the Sign of the Cross and begin with a prayer to Jesus to ask for strength.
- With a strong temptation that I often end up giving in to, I will avoid putting myself in the situation where the temptation usually arises.
- (Write your own resolution) I will
Concluding Prayer
Soul of Christ, be my sanctification.
Body of Christ, be my salvation.
Blood of Christ, fill all my veins.
Water from Christ’s side, wash out my stains.
Passion of Christ, my comfort be.
O Good Jesus, listen to me!
In thy wounds I fain would hide, Ne’er to be parted from thy side.
Guard me should the foe assail me.
Guide me when my life shall fail me.
Bid me come to thee above,
With the saints to sing thy love,
World without end.
Amen.
— Anima Christi, a medieval Latin prayer, translated by Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman
