{"id":3641,"date":"2020-06-04T13:27:15","date_gmt":"2020-06-04T13:27:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/?p=3641"},"modified":"2020-06-04T13:27:15","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T13:27:15","slug":"faith-love-self-esteem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/2020\/06\/04\/faith-love-self-esteem\/","title":{"rendered":"Faith-Love-Self Esteem"},"content":{"rendered":"

HOMILY WEEK 09 04 \u2013 Year II<\/p>\n

Love and Do What You Will<\/em><\/p>\n

(2 Tim 2:8-15; Ps 25; Mk 12:28-34)<\/p>\n

******************************************<\/p>\n

How well are you able to love yourself? Are you struggling with low self-worth? Do you realize you might daily be breaking one of the commandments of Jesus?<\/p>\n

The way out is to listen to today\u2019s psalm and learn the way of the Lord \u2013 which is to keep the Great Commandment to love.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"To do so is to be able to follow the teaching of St. Augustine \u2013 love and do what we will. That is possible because if we truly love, we will want to do only what is God\u2019s will.<\/p>\n

The teaching of Jesus in today\u2019s gospel is very clear. It is God\u2019s will that we love God with our whole being, and all others as we love ourselves.<\/p>\n

The first part of this commandment was very familiar to the Jewish people. To love God with our whole being is the Great Shema of Judaism (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) given by Moses to the people convened before him, by which God charged them to, \u201c\u2026 bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Some take this literally. In the Toronto airport en route to Palestine, I saw an orthodox Jew wrap a leather thong around his arm as he recited his prayers. At the Western Wall in Jerusalem, I witnessed an orthodox Jew wrapping a leather thong around the arm of a tourist, lift up his baseball cap, and place a square amulet on his forehead!<\/p>\n

What was not so familiar to the Jewish people of Jesus\u2019 time was the second part of that commandment, taken from an obscure law hidden among the plethora of other laws in Leviticus (Leviticus 19:18) which reads, \u201cbut you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.\u201d Jesus took this easily ignored law from the Old Testament and placed it side by side with the Great Shema of Judaism, basically equating the two.<\/p>\n

This meant that for Jesus, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves is just as important as Great Shema – loving God with our whole being. That was shocking, and totally new. No one had ever done that before. Yet that very teaching becomes the heart of the new commandment Jesus gave his followers, a teaching St. Paul took to heart as we read in the first reading: \u201csuffering hardship, to the point of being chained like a criminal.\u201d Daring as Paul was, he even went a step further in Galatians 5:14, declaring the last part of this commandment fulfills the first: \u201cFor the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, \u2018You shall love your neighbor as yourself.\u2019\u201d For Paul, this commandment may even be the best way to love God.<\/p>\n

To love our neighbor is fairly clear \u2013 treat others fairly, forgive them their failings, try to understand them, affirm and encourage them, do good to them, trust them and share life with them. What is very disturbing, however, is how some people can think they are doing this through devotions yet treat someone they don\u2019t like very harshly. The saying, \u201cWould that we could see ourselves as others see us,\u201d applies here.<\/p>\n

What is more challenging, however, is to love ourselves. That is perhaps where we fail the most. Many of us have a hard time accepting ourselves as we are, beat ourselves up for our past mistakes, refuse to forgive ourselves, reject compliments from others, and find it easier to love others than to love ourselves. At one low point in my life, a friend told me, \u201cYour refusal to forgive yourself is worse than anything you have ever done!\u201d That shocked me out of my self-deprecating mood and actually changed my life at that time. All of this may be part of the inspiration for the book I am currently writing on self-awareness and learning to love ourselves.<\/p>\n

Rarely has anyone come to me over all my years of ministry to admit that their greatest sin was, \u201cI don\u2019t love myself.\u201d During one mission, a diminutive looking woman came to talk. She had been sexually abused as a child, was in an abusive marriage, and shared with me she was a \u201cnon-person, a nobody.\u201d The only thing that was keeping her going was she had a key to the church and came in each day to pray before the Blessed Sacrament. I felt for her and tried to encourage her \u2013 at least she was naming her reality, sharing it with another person, and just maybe in that small way, starting to love herself. I gave her Isaiah 43:1-4 to pray with, a passage given to me by my spiritual director that started my healing journey as a young Oblate seminarian.<\/p>\n

The Eucharist is a powerful experience of God\u2019s love through forgiveness and healing, and a wonderful way to love God back. It is also an opportunity to love ourselves as we admit our need for forgiveness and help, and at the dismissal we are commissioned to go and love others as Jesus has loved us.<\/p>\n

May our celebration empower us to believe in God\u2019s love for us, love God back with our whole being, love others as best we can, and above all, remember to love ourselves. Then, we will be truly able to live that teaching of St. Augustine \u2013 love and do what we will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HOMILY WEEK 09 04 \u2013 Year II Love and Do What You Will (2 Tim 2:8-15; Ps 25; Mk 12:28-34) ****************************************** How well are you able to love yourself? Are you struggling with low self-worth? Do you realize you might daily be breaking one of the commandments of Jesus? The way out is to listen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homilies","category-ordinary-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3645,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3641\/revisions\/3645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}