“God created human beings to praise, reverence and serve God and by doing this, to save their souls.” Anyone who has made the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius will recognize that right away as the preliminary prayer of the Saint or what he calls the first principle and foundation. I have to admit though that when I first encountered that, I was taken aback and misunderstood it. I reacted negatively. I thought, this God of Ignatius was so needful of attention. He created human beings just so they can praise, worship and serve him like slaves. Isn’t he being too narcissistic, too egoistic and too self-referential. Of course, now I know better. As they say, I am older and wiser.
I remember all this, my initial incursions into the spiritual exercises, because of the Gospel we’ve read today. Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God with everything we’ve got. And the second one is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Like many, I have had no problem with the second one. As a social activist in my youth, I have always advocated for love of neighbor in terms of social justice, basic services for the poor, human rights, etc. And as for the first one, the greatest commandment, I have always seen it from the viewpoint of the second one. You love God whom you do not see in your neighbor whom you see.
But a Jesuit early on corrected me. No. You have to take on God separately. Yes, you find him in his creatures but he is more than your neighbor and creation. You seek him out in prayer, in silence, in the Bible, in the sacraments, in his daily engagements with you. And so, as Jesus tells us today, you have to love God, as he is, for who he is, in himself. That is settled. God is an entity unto himself, and must be reckoned with, as it were, in his own terms. But still I struggle with the order of priority. Why is loving him the greatest of all commandments. In other words, why should he go first? Why should we love him first? I have a friend. He got married to a beautiful and loving wife and they had three children. I had never seen him so happy, so contented with his life. And he would say that literally. He had a perfect wife, a perfect life. Admittedly though, God was not part of that life, except for the routinary Sunday mass. He was never spiritual or religious, but he was nonetheless a very kind and generous person. But one day, his wife got terribly sick, and in just a few months, passed away. My friend understandably went through depression; but when I spoke with him after some time, he said, only when his wife had passed away that he discovered God, that life was this enormous mystery bigger than himself, his wife, his family, and at the center of all of that is God. He thought life ended when he lost his wife; but it continued, life, love continued. Because God remains, he said.
What my friend discovered or realized is what philosophers have been telling us about God. God is the very ground of everything. He is being itself, life itself, beauty itself, love itself. And creatures like us only participate in God’s very life. And so to understand ourselves, our world, we must deal with him, with mystery. And that is the reason why he comes first. When Jesus tells us to love God first, it sounds a command, an order, a summons. In fact, as many of us know as we get older, he is merely sharing with us the deep truth about our lives. We love God first, because he is at the center, the core of our very lives, our very selves, our very existence. He is alpha and omega. He is not one other being competing for our love, but Being itself, life itself, love itself.
Homily delivered by Fr. Emmanuel “Nono” Alfonso, SJ
30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
29 October 2023
Cenacle Retreat House