Standing at the peak of God’s creation, in addition to being stewards; human beings have the awesome responsibility of knowing, loving, and serving our God in this life so to be happy with him in the next. Made in God’s image and likeness our desire to know, love, and serve our Lord is a response to our God who knows, loves, and serves us first.
More importantly, our love-response stems from God who loves himself. From a Trinitarian theological perspective, we understand that the three persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - are one God who is Love. This undivided unity and perfect communion of love is the cause of our joy.
More than a mathematical, theological construct, the holy Trinity, undivided unity, holy God, mighty God, is “Love loving Love.” God who is Love must necessarily, for our sake, be an undivided, uninterrupted, and unmatched unity of love. It is in God that we find our source and summit of love in this life.
Jesus’ command to love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind belongs not only to man and woman, but to angels as well. Souls in both the visible and invisible world give glory to God as the source of all creation. In fact, all that lives and breathes responds to God with praise. The heavens, angels and archangels, the mountains, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the moon and the stars, the wind and the rain, praise and exalt God forever.2
When a couple stands at the altar, they make a vow to love and honor each other in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, until death. This Sacrament of vocation to marriage responds to the love that is found in the most perfect communion of our Triune God.
A couple’s commitment to love and honor is a necessary daily task not only for the man and wife, but also for the sake of their children. If a child sees parents committed to each other, the child feels secure. Observing his parents kiss, dance together, pray as one, and genuinely enjoy each other’s company brings a child peace. This is also true for adult children who watch their parents grow old together.
Often, young children and adult children may try to pit one parent against the other. This may be played out when a child asks the father for a treat and the father says, “You can have one if it is okay with your mother.” Sometimes, adult children will try to get one parent to disagree with the other
in order for the adult child to get his way.
Couples who love and honor each other will not allow their children to get in between them. Not surprisingly, this absolute bond of love is for the benefit of the children as well as for the parents. When the authority of parenthood in the vocation of marriage is challenged and weakened, the whole family suffers.
A strong vocation of marriage mirrors God’s perfect, undivided unity. God must love God. Not only for God’s sake, but for the sake of all creation. We benefit from God loving God. Only in this Trinity of perfect love is all creation held together.
Even when a married couple lives out their daily commitment to love and honor each other for the sake of their marriage and for their family; children do not make the same vows. They are taught to respect one another and to live in harmony, but that is a learning process.
Because it is a learning process, and because children have free will, there is bound to be sibling rivalry and disharmony. For young children, this is normal. For adult children, this is discomforting.
Often, when siblings are corrected for not getting along, a child’s anger may turn from peer-to-peer rivalry to child-parent disharmony. When adult children with free will choose to turn their problems on their parents, the family is disjointed. But, if the couple stays true to their commitment to love and honor each other, the family will not be destroyed.
The same is true for God and all souls with free will. Angels and humans turning against each other is a sign of a disordered world. Thankfully, we have a God who abides in perfect communion - God loving God. And so, while we may be disordered, we are not destroyed.
Our loving God and Creator, calls us back to him and invites us (commands us) to love one another. Recognizing that we are limited in our capacity to remain in his love, God sent his only begotten Son, the Word made flesh, so that creation might love the Creator perfectly.
The command to love God with our whole heart, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, is a command of fidelity.
As a husband and wife must be faithful to each other, God expects us to be faithful to him. Not only in the sense that we are to follow his commands, but that he asks us to accept him and not lose trust in him; in the same way a child begs his mother to not leave him.
This call to fidelity - to follow and not abandon - has been a command from the beginning of creation.
Even before the Fall of Satan, God commanded his angels to abide in his love. Even before the original sin of our first parents, our God expected us to walk in his garden of perfect communal love.
Thankfully, when sin entered the world, God set in motion a plan of salvation. While we abandoned God and failed to follow him, God remained faithful to us. In fact, because we had sinned, we saw the depth of God’s fidelity to us.
The Exultet, proclaimed at the Easter Vigil goes, “Oh, happy fault! Oh, necessary sin of Adam.” This means that if we had not sinned, God would have had no reason to save us.
Because of God’s endless fidelity to self and to us, all creation, all angels, all holy souls, can rightly sing together, “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of your glory! Hosanna in the highest!”3
-------St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.
Notes:
2. Daniel 3:52-90
3. Sanctus, Roman Missal
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