“Do Everything for the Glory of God” by Rev. Paul Berghout
Piety
I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation. Psalm 32:1
Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 10:32
A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, touched him, and said to him, “I do will it. Be made clean.” Matthew 1:40-41
Study
In Rome, where St. Valentine lived and died as a martyr for Christ, at the one-mile marker on the Flaminian Way, was a basilica dedicated in his name. It was a “munifice ornate” (magnificently ornate).[i]
Love is also the most ornate spiritual clothing we could wear. Colossians 3:12-17 says, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.”
Stan Mast asks, “When we get dressed each day, we begin with what?” Our underwear, of course, or what old-timers called ‘foundation garments.’ When Paul talks about compassion and humility, he means the foundation garments of the Christian life. These two-character traits are fundamental to human relationships. They summarize how we feel deep down inside about each other and ourselves. Putting on compassion means that we feel with each other. Putting on humility is how we feel about ourselves—not negative feelings about ourselves, but a lack of focus on ourselves.
Next, Paul calls us to put on Christian life’s basic work clothes—kindness and gentleness. Those are the jeans and sweatshirts we wear in the everyday world. Then, each day we must put on the shoes of patience. Paul mentions the final article of clothing is the overcoat of love. “…and over all these virtues put on love, which binds them together in perfect unity.”[ii]
Love takes a long-range view of the beloved’s best interest. God’s pure self-forgetful gift love has a perfect view of the beloved’s needs and true fulfillment. Grogan writes, “Falling in love with the person of Jesus can be quite gentle and unnoticed and the quiet fruit of a good upbringing: it is in the Two Standards [from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola] that the painful implications of the relationship are starkly unfolded. One may feel trapped: ‘I never realized that discipleship could mean this!’ One desires Christ but fears the demands of being with him. Yielding to the attractiveness of Christ makes it possible to yield to the non-attractiveness of his way of poverty and insults.[iii]
St. Valentine was a martyr for Christ. It was in St. Valentine’s honor that the
The spiritual gate of neighborly love is the immediate fruit of one’s transformational union with God. This fruit ripens because the self is the primary agent in partnership with God, and thus the immediate subject whom the self begins to love differently, trying to love as God loves. Rightly ordered love transformatively emanates from God through experiencing God.
The transformation helps explain Jesus’s Greatest Commandment: “To love your neighbor as yourself’ (Mt 22:39; cf. Mk 12:31, Lk 10:27).
As Bishop Barron says, “Real love is a leaping outside of the narrow confines of my needs and desires, and an embrace of the other’s good for the other’s sake. It is an escape from the black hole of the ego, which tends to draw everything around it into itself.”
The two most overlooked romantic phrases are “I was wrong” and “Will you forgive me?” Paul Lewis calls these phrases the most overlooked romantic words ever spoken by couples because they engender humility. And humility is essential to coming marital mountains.
The first site of Holy Rome that the pilgrims of that time saw as they approached from the north was the great basilica of St. Valentine. In those days, they walked from Germany, from France, from Catholic England, from holy Ireland, over the mountains and plains and rivers, in the cold, in heat, in rain and sun and dust.
Valentine welcomed them on arriving and wished them God-speed when they left. It was perhaps on this account that his memory was especially dear to them.[iv]
Action
If knowing God is the most significant objective good for humans, then the aim of real love is helping others know God and know His Love.
Henri Nouwen was a priest and a psychology professor who taught at some of the world’s most prestigious universities. One day, he gave up his more comfortable life of teaching and serving at a prominent church to work as a chaplain at a residential community for developmentally disabled adults in Toronto.
In one of his books, Fr. Henri tells this story:
One day a resident of the program named Janet came up and asked him for a blessing. Henri made with the sign of the cross over her and said a short prayer. The woman was not satisfied. She said, “Henri, it didn’t work.”
What was she talking about? His blessing didn’t work?
“No,” protested Janet. “I want a real blessing!”
Janet’s face shone with joy. This was the blessing she’d been looking for. The other worshippers got up out of their seats and came forward too, all requesting the same kind of blessing Janet had received.
They all wanted a hug and sincere words of appreciation.[v]
If only we
will be His Valentine. Amen.
Image 1 by Jorge Guillen from Pixabay
Image 3 by Kranich17 from Pixabay
[i] Carola MacMurrough, The Catholic Valentine, Orate Fratres, January 1, 1941.
[ii] Colossians 3:12-17, Author: Stan Mast.
[iii] Brian Grogan, ‘Presenting the Two Standards II’, The Way Supplement, 55 (1986)
[iv] ibid; MacMurrough.
[v] Based on a story told by Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved (New York: Crossroad, 1992), pp. 70-72.]
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