Lose your life, and you will find it

13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: 2 Kgs 4:8-12a, 14-17
Second Reading: Rom 6:3-4, 8-11
Gospel Reading: Mt 10:37-42

Unless we love Jesus more than father or mother, son or daughter, we are not worthy of him, Jesus says in the Gospel Reading.

He did not mean that we must abandon our families. He meant that we must have a conscious readiness to give up our natural loves—affection, friendship, and eros (the love that expresses itself in sexual union)—whenever they conflict with love of him—the willed and committed love called agape.

Now the only way of knowing that we are really ready to do something is actually to do it. Accordingly, God asks some of us to renounce a natural love for his sake.

For example, he asked Abraham to leave his own people and later to kill his only son Isaac—to the point of raising the knife to strike. He has asked innumerable martyrs to renounce their natural love of life. He asks a man to renounce eros for a woman who is already married.

However, even when he does not ask us to kill our natural loves, he asks us to let him transform them into agape.

We cannot enter Heaven except as members of Christ’s Mystical Body. Similarly, our natural loves cannot enter Heaven unless they are transformed into agape. As God became Man by taking our nature up into his, so he takes our natural loves up into agape.

Without this transformation, a natural love would be meaningless in Heaven. Meeting in Heaven someone you had loved only naturally on earth would be like meeting, as an adult, someone who had been your friend in elementary school because you both liked hopscotch!

Just as, in becoming members of Christ’s Body, we do not lose our identities, but become fully and uniquely human; so, as our natural loves are transformed into agape, they do not lose their nature; rather, God perfects their nature.

“Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it,” St. Thomas Aquinas said. Without agape, “eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature,” Pope Benedict XVI said.

How do we let God transform our natural loves?

The command to love our neighbours as ourselves means overcoming the unjustified self-ward bias, called selfishness or egotism, that we inherit as part of our fallen nature, which accounts for the daily friction and frustration that arise in every natural love.

Egotism says that all this friction is someone else’s fault—my husband’s laziness, or my wife’s urge to control, or my children’s disobedience. But friction results from the rubbing together of two surfaces; it is most severe where either surface is rough.

The faults we hate most in others are probably our own. For example, it is because I wanted to be the centre of things at the party that I am so annoyed that someone else was. A real estate agent I know, when asked, “What are the neighbours like here?” replies, “What are they like where you live now?”

There is something in everyone that needs forbearance, tolerance, and forgiveness. If we practise these virtues ourselves and accept them from others, God transforms our natural loves into agape.

Where there is much friction in our natural loves, the necessity of rising above it is obvious. Without much friction, we may not realize that we have any rising to do.

In the first stages of eros, lovers find it impossible to imagine, let alone believe, that friction will ever arise. When—not if —it does, they think they should start again at the bottom of the ladder, “in love” with someone else.

Instead, they should recognize the friction as an invitation—even a challenge—from God to take the next step upward on the ladder from eros to agape. After all, it is agape, not eros, they promised when they married.

Eros has to grow into agape, or it will not even remain sweet eros here on earth, let alone enter Heaven.

Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available on YouTube in both written and audio form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course, and will remain available until the end of August. Father will teach the whole course again, with new insights, starting August 30.

Your voice matters! Join the conversation by submitting a Letter to the Editor here.