The Great Task is To Love

Doing something that matters involves sacrifice, involves sometimes carrying our own cross.  Jesus knew this.  Heck, he lived it.  He carried his own cross, suffered death by the shedding of his blood on the wood of that cross, so that we may all have life eternal, a life to the full, a life and a love that never ever dies, and a life and a love that never ever dies.  In the Gospel of John, Chapter 15, Verse 13 we read, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  In our first reading of the day, from the Letter to the Philippians (2:17), we hear Saint Paul say, “But, even if I am poured out as a libation upon the sacrificial service of your faith”.  Finally, in our Gospel (Luke 14:27) Jesus himself teaches that love, a love that never ever dies, involves in some way sacrifice when he says, “Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” 

I learned this lesson, that true love, divine love involves sacrifice, when I was a young man studying in the seminary.  In 1994, I like Martha, in the gospel story of Martha and Mary (Luke 10:41) was anxious about many things. I was a diocesan seminarian plowing through the stress of studies. My father, a salty old dog of a man, a former Navy Officer, was dying of cancer. He was a stern man and since I was the one closest to home, I went home on weekends in order to take care of him, and so being his caregiver, well this was another stressor.
Second, my brothers and sisters were fighting over the best way to take care of our dying father and being the single and studying pastoral ministry I ended up being the mediator – anxious city, you know it. All of this anxiousness damaged a dear relationship with a fellow seminarian. It was winter and I was in the midst of a lot of paper writing, tests, and all that other Jazz, worried about many things. It had snowed heavily the night before a big test, and I was awoken by a phone call.

It was my dad calling that he needed help and to be checked into the hospital, with one final dig he said to me, ‘that I cared more about my friends, than I did him’. In the early morning cold, I trudged to the dining hall and met my friend there, but I was now in a crappy mood because of what my dad said and the stressors of life. I snapped at my friend accusing him of the same thing that my dad accused me of, of not being there for me, through all of my current anxious life experiences. I yelled at him, and then realizing I forgot my wallet and keys, I walked back to my room to retrieve them.

When I came back to the dining room’s parking lot my friend met me by the car, he on one side and I on the other, and I chastised him again about not being loving and supportive, he threw up his hands in a gesture that spoke to me of, ‘I  surrender, I give up’, and he then walked away. I looked down, and saw then that he had brushed all the snow off the car and scraped the ice from the heavy snowfall the night before. My heart in anger and in my anxiousness missed the love that was present all around me. So remember this, this day and always, that moments of divine love are actually all around us and that true love involves, in some moving and profound ways, sacrifice.