The perfect moment box
“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.”
It’s the Great Commandment. It’s the heart of today’s Gospel. And at first glance, it seems kind of impossible.
Especially if you don’t have the luxury of spending all your waking hours in prayer.
Or if you’ve been hurt by life – whether through no fault of your own, your own doing, or some of both.
Or if (however it happened) things have come between you and God.
In other words, if you’re human.
Since we’re all humans here, is there anything we can do about this? Or are we just stuck with an impossible demand from an implacable God?
Actually, there is something we can do about it. And it starts with dropping the subtext.
First, know that God does not do subtext. If God is upset with you, He will tell you in words of one syllable (see the Old Testament for details).
Subtext is a human thing. And, in my experience, the subtext we load onto God is almost always off the mark.
The subtext that most of us add to the Great Commandment is a pair of very not helpful ideas. That the “all your heart, all your soul” stuff means God is demanding perfect love, perfect devotion (something that few of us are capable of on our best days). And that this sort of thing can only be done under perfect circumstances, with nothing else going on and no distractions.
Which is why I love today’s saint, St. Frances of Rome.
St. Frances of Rome took the Great Commandment seriously. And bought into all the subtext. Which is why she wanted to be a cloistered nun. Thinking that was what she had to do, to have those perfect circumstances (fyi - every monk and nun knows better). So that she could “love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”
Her family had other plans and pressured her into marriage.
Her first thought? Everything was ruined. As a wife and a mother, she told herself she would never have the perfect circumstances that she thought she needed to meet – not God’s expectations, but the impossible standard that she had burdened herself with.
In despair, she cried to her spiritual director about how things had gone so horribly wrong and how (as she saw it) she would never be able to fulfill God’s will for her life.
Her spiritual director’s response is something that I find myself coming back to time and again, “Are you crying because you want to do God’s will or because you want God to do your will?”
It brought her up short. She took it to heart. And started to unravel all of her expectations, all of the subtext that she loaded onto God.
Over the course of a marriage with six children (only one of whom survived to adulthood), Frances learned to take her relationship with God out of the perfect moment box. To bring God into every part of her life. Until she could confidently say, “It is most laudable in a married woman to be devout, but she must never forget that she is a housewife. And sometimes she must leave God at the altar to find Him in her housekeeping.”
Frances’ expression of the idea may be centered on the life she found herself living. But her wisdom and its truth transcend place and time, and apply to all of us. Because, as Frances shows us with her life, God is the not the God of the perfect moment box.
Sometimes we must leave God at the altar to find Him in what He has called us to do.
Sometimes we must leave God at the altar to find Him in the tasks of daily living.
Sometimes we must leave God at the altar to find Him in the people He has placed in our lives.
That is what it really means to “love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”
Today’s Readings
