Today is the Solemnity of All Saints. It is the day the Church celebrates the men and women who have gone before us in faith and to remember that we are surrounded by a great company of witnesses. Their perseverance and endurance on the path to holiness serve as lampposts to guide us on the journey. They are lights to us because they radiate the love of God in a Fallen world and they show us that all that truly matters in this life is love of God and love of one another.
True love or charity is what grounds all of existence. It is love that brought creation into being and it is the gratuitous charity of God that brought human beings and angels into being. Love is a constant movement away from self towards God and others, which all of creation and the Paschal Mystery witness to. Christ gives His life in sacrifice, in total self-emptying surrender to the Father for us. He is our model. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI puts it this way in Deus Caritas Est (God is Love):
“Love embraces the whole of existence in each of its dimensions, including the dimension of time. It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life ill preserve it” (Lk 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels ( cf. Mt 10:39; 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24; Jn 12:25).”
Love is a constant movement away from ourselves towards God and others. It is a repeated dying to self in order to love God and others more deeply. If we are caving in on ourselves, then we have moved away from authentic love towards sin. This is one of the great confusions in our culture and within the Church. As we seek to “embrace” the world, we cave in on ourselves, we no longer seek the light and truth God provides to us. Instead we focus too much on ourselves and we are unable to love as Christ loves.
What then does authentic love look like in our time and in all ages? In the most basic sense when we are considering our love for God and others we need to look to the saints who gave their lives fully to Christ. They point us to our eschatological home: heaven. They show us Who we are made for and What we are made for: God. Our ultimate happiness and fulfillment can only be found in Christ Jesus.
When we consider all of the forms of “love” being espoused in our culture, we can very quickly discard any counterfeit placed before us that keeps us from Christ or true authentic love of our neighbor. If it is not from Christ or leading us to Christ then it needs to be thrown away. The world and the Enemy will constantly offer us counterfeits and we have to fight ardently to resist them and to allow that resistance to mold us in the holy fire of caritas.
The greatest love we can show our neighbor is a deep desire for them to become a saint. This is not only true in marriage or within the fraternal brotherhood of the ministerial priesthood. This is true between all brothers and sisters in Christ and it is true that we should desire it for our neighbors who are not yet with us at the eucharistic banquet. The meaning of our lives is to become a saint. To give our entire selves over to God and our neighbor. To become a conduit of the divine life in a dying world.
Holy love is deeply difficult in our Fallen state. It is something that demands our willingness to wage the battles required of us and it means keeping our focus on the communion we all share in Christ. He is the very center of all that we do. The saints gave everything over to God. They no longer trusted in themselves because they came to see their own weakness in relation to love of God. By emptying themselves out to God they were then able to turn in authentic, holy love to their neighbor because they allowed God to dwell within every part of their being. But, what is this authentic love?
St. Thomas Aquinas defines love as: “Willing the good of the other, as other.” It means that we cannot will evil or use other people. Those tendencies within our Fallen nature must be fiercely combated and in so doing God will reward us with a purified and holy love for others. Much of this life is trial by fire, we must be refined in the divine furnace of love in order to be able to love people for their own sake and to truly will their good. Love is painful because it requires constant purification as we are conformed to Christ. This love comes from an encounter with God, which then moves outward towards others. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI explains:
“Love of neighbor 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 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…Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave. Here we see the necessary interplay between love of God and love of neighbor…”
We are called outward from our communion with God towards others, even our enemies. We are meant to see as He sees. To love as He loves. This type of love inevitably means that in willing the good of the other we may have to help guide others towards the path to holiness. It means that holy relationships are more demanding. It means sacrifice for both parties. These relationships require us to encourage one another towards heaven and at times that means the difficult task of fraternal correction or gentle prodding.
This correction is of course difficult for all of us since in our Fallen state we battle pride. None of us likes to be corrected. Ask a husband and wife how easy it is to accept loving correction, even when it is grounded in God and the marital vocation of the spouses helping one another towards heaven. This is why humility is essential in the spiritual life, so that we can be open to God’s working in our lives through other people.
In our culture especially, we believe love is simply acceptance and warm feelings. The saints often spoke hard truths in order to help others come to Christ. This does not mean we go around constantly criticizing others. Fraternal correction must first come from a place of prayer and genuine holy love because it is inevitably going to challenge and even temporarily hurt the other person.
The social media version of fraternal correction that is so rampant is not largely based on divine and fraternal charity. It often is our desire to be right and lord over others. We must first be willing to see any spiritual blindness keeping us from loving the person we seek to correct. Do we truly see that person with the eyes of Christ? More-often-than-not the answer is no and we cannot will the good of another until we come to a place of authentic love. We can quote the saints all day long to justify our actions, but no saint is going to support our actions if they are not grounded in charity.
The opposite of this uncharitable correction is the other error we face in our time, even in large sections of the Church. In the desire to “accompany” people on their journey, which often means accepting behavior that is sinful. In this case, we shirk the responsibilities that charity places upon us. We are meant to walk together in the communion we share, but that does not mean accepting sin. To do so is to no longer will the good of the other because we desire something less than God for them. We offer them a compromise, which is nothing more than a cheap counterfeit only the world or the Enemy can offer. It will leave those people empty. If the option available is anything less than Christ, then it is not grounded in divine and fraternal charity.
As Christian disciples and evangelists, we are called to draw people into the great mystery and gift of salvation just the saints did who went before us. We are called to love God above all things and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Our faith is too little if we do not believe that our neighbor can be fulfilled completely by Christ. Our charity becomes hollow if we do not offer all that Christ and the Church offers to the world. May we come to love Christ and our neighbor with the same love as the saints we celebrate today.
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