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12th Sunday after Pentecost
THE FACE OF LOVE
For two thousand years, generations of Catholic faithful have listened to today's great sermon of the Good Samaritan given by Our Lord himself. It is perhaps the greatest of his parables, concerned as it is with the highest of virtues, and the greatest of the commandments, which is To Love. "Thou shalt love the Lord God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." And this commandment is illustrated in the well-known story of the Good Samaritan, who goes out of his way to help a stranger who has been attacked by robbers and is lying by the wayside, someone whom the priests and Pharisees have passed by without a thought.
This then is love, or charity, according to Our Lord. But can we put a face to this kind of charity so that we can recognize true charity when we see it, and learn to practise it more easily? The great and holy convert St. Augustine, asked a similar question in one of his sermons: “What does charity look like anyhow?” And he gives this answer:
“It has hands to help; it has feet to hasten to the poor and needy; it has eyes to see misery and want and suffering; it has ears to hear the sighs and moans of men; and last, but not least,” he says, “it has a heart which can love and bless. That is what love looks like.”
But today I would like to add something to these words of St. Augustine. Because when I try to picture someone, I don’t usually think of their eyes and ears, or of their hands, and certainly never their feet. I think of their face. Let's put a face to this abstract idea of charity. Let's know truly what love looks like. For the face of love is the face of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
It is no coincidence that this year, the 12th Sunday after Pentecost, with its Gospel of the Good Samaritan, falls within the Octave of the Assumption. (An Octave, by the way, which was so unhappily suppressed by the modernist liturgical reformers barely four or five years after Pope Pius XII had defined the dogma of the Assumption in 1950.) During this Octave (which we do celebrate in the traditional Catholic liturgy of the Confraternity), our thoughts are constantly on our blessed Mother. How fitting that the story of the Good Samaritan should interject itself into these thoughts. That this great parable of love should mingle with our meditations upon Our Lady assumed into heaven. For now we know that this image of Our Lady being taken up to her eternal reward and everlasting glory is the true Face of Love.
What do I mean by this? Why is Our Lady the true face of love? Think about it. Think of all the titles of Our Lady that you can remember: Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Our Lady of Good Counsel, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted, and so on. If you reflect on each of these titles, you will come to the realization that every one of them somehow reflects the love Our Lady has for us. Are you storm-tossed on your journey through life? "Star of the Sea, pray for us!" Are you or a loved one suffering from some terrible malady? "Health of the Sick, pray for us!" With every name we call Our Lady, every attempt we make to describe her under some aspect or another, we are acknowledging her care, her protection, her guidance, her counseling, her healing... in short, her love.
And if you wanted to choose just one title for Our Lady which encapsulates all these other names, what would you pick? Think back to the words of St. Augustine: “What does love look like? Above all, it has a heart, which can love and bless. This is what love looks like.” What a wonderful thing then, that this coming Wednesday is the great feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. For this title surely, more than all others, describes Our Lady as the Face of Love.
The great proponent of the Immaculate Heart of Mary was St. John Eudes, a seventeenth-century French missionary, who wrote a book on the Admirable Heart of the Holy Mother of God, and founded the Society of the Heart of the Mother Most Admirable. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "The feast of the Holy Heart of Mary was celebrated for the first time in 1648, and that of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1672, each as a double of the first class with an octave. The Mass and Office proper to these were composed by Father Eudes, who thus had the honour of preceding the Blessed Margaret Mary in establishing the devotion to the Sacred Hearts. For this reason, Pope Leo XIII, in proclaiming his virtues heroic in 1903, gave him the title of Author of the Liturgical Worship of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Holy Heart of Mary". St. John Eudes was canonized in 1925 by Pope Pius XI, and his feastday is on August 19th. In fact, his feastday is today.
But let us return to the image of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as being the Face of Love. Do you need to be reminded of some examples of that love? To begin with, let us remember how Mary, as the perfect embodiment of Motherhood, cared for the physical necessities of her Son, first as an infant in the stable at Bethlehem, feeding him when he was hungry, wrapping him in swaddling clothes to keep his little body warm, and then later fleeing to Egypt to protect him from the evil wiles of King Herod, presenting him to God in the temple, seeking him when he was lost in Jerusalem. And later still, see her anguish when she was unable to relieve her Son in his bitter Passion on Calvary, see how the terrible sword which Simeon had foretold, was plunged into that Immaculate Heart.
And then let us remember all the ways the Blessed Mother cares for Our Lord’s Mystical Body. For his Church. For us. Our Lord passed on to us the privilege of being children of Mary, when he gave her to us with his dying words from the Cross. "Mother, behold thy son." And Our Lady did not take that responsibility lightly. Indeed, the ways in which Our Lady cares for us are numberless, far too many for us to list, and too personal perhaps for us to talk about. Our lives are constant examples of Our Lady's loving care. Perhaps, when you have a moment, read through the Litany of Loreto and its many titles of the Blessed Virgin. See how in each title, Our Lady has shown her love for you, and after each invocation utter a fervent “Ora pro nobis!”
In return for the love our Mother heaps upon us, let us return this love to her in some small way. The best way of doing this is to imitate her Immaculate Heart in loving God above all and then our neighbour as ourself. “Love one another, as I have loved you,” said Our Lord, and who better followed his commandment than his blessed Mother? Let us follow in her holy footsteps.
But how do we love our neighbour? I know it is sometimes not easy for modern men in particular to show outward affection, or love. It is regarded as somehow not “cool”, not “macho”. But who among these "macho men" can honestly say that they never loved their mother. You see, God created us with a human nature, both women and men. He gave us all a natural, biological, mother, and for men to love their mother is, after all, natural. There is a story for example, of a hardened criminal on death row, who begged the prison chaplain to be allowed to see his mother one last time before his execution.
This love we all have for our mothers is God's way of showing us how we should love all men. And above all other mothers, Our Lord gave us his Blessed Mother, so that we can love her, and in so doing, be inspired, by her love for us and the love she bears to all God's children, to imitate her and have the strength and courage truly to love our neighbour as ourself.
The famous Capuchin preacher, Father Venantius of New York City, put it this way:
“How often do we find a prodigal Catholic, who for years lived a life of sin in that far country Christ speaks of? But the thought of his heavenly Mother, or the rosary of his First Communion which was still in his possession, or the little picture his mother gave him when he left home, or the Ave Maria he had been saying daily at the request of his dying mother, obtained for him the grace of conversion on his deathbed. It is like the last little leaf on a tree. As long as that one little leaf is still green, there is still life. When it falls, all is gone; the last hope is lost; and the tree, naked and bare, is ready to be cut down and cast into the fire!--Vita! Dulcedo! Et Spes nostra! Salve!”
So let us love one another, without fear, without embarrassment, but unashamedly and as Christians. I am reminded of the words of a Protestant hymn they used to sing in the old Methodist chapels of Yorkshire: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” And I wonder sometimes--will they? Look around at the world, so full of stories of hatred and vengeance, acts of violence and even murder, the unprovoked modern-day holocaust waged against the unborn. Can this world of sin look at our own little world of traditional Catholics, and say, as the pagans did in the time of the early Roman persecutions: "See these Christians. See how much they love one another.”? When Our Lord washed his disciples' feet the night of the Last Supper, he told us flat out: “By this will all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love for one another.” Do all men know that you are the disciples of Christ?
What can we do to change? To make reparation for our lack of charity in the past? With the Face of Love ever before us to show us the way, let us from now on imitate our blessed Mother, and for the love of God, for the love of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, let us stop forever finding faults in our neighbour. Let us stop dwelling on his lack of this or that virtue, his bad behaviour, his slights towards us, real or imaginary, even his wickedness if such there be. God will take care of all that. Let us rather think of him through the eyes of charity, as the infant he once was in the arms of his mother, helpless and needful. Let us find the ways to help him, to bring him mercy as he lays by the wayside, and to forgive him his trespasses, as only then, please God, will our own be forgiven.
And then, maybe, we can become true shining beacons of charity, illuminating the darkness of this world with our love of God and neighbour. We can become magnets of our Faith, attracting men to the truth of our religion by the love and goodness we show to them and to all.
Pray during this Octave of Our Lady assumed into heaven, pray today on this feast of St. John Eudes, and pray especially on the feast of her Immaculate Heart on Wednesday, that she will help us develop our love of God and neighbour, this greatest of all virtues that will abide when Faith and Hope have passed away. Pray that she will take our stone-cold hearts, replacing them with a heart like unto hers, ablaze with the love of her Son, Jesus Christ, and of all her children. For we are all her children. We all have the same Mother. And so they are all in a very true sense our brothers and sisters. In the name of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and with her shining Face of Love ever before us, let us never do to them as the pharisees did to the Good Samaritan. Let us never pass them by.
Comments
Cal
August 20, 2012 - 3:17 AM
Let me add another thanks for this Sermon. I only get to go to a Traditional Mass once a month so finding this was a blessing today. I will check each Sunday for a sermon to read before my spiritual communion.
12th Sunday after Pentecost
THE FACE OF LOVE
For two thousand years, generations of Catholic faithful have listened to today's great sermon of the Good Samaritan given by Our Lord himself. It is perhaps the greatest of his parables, concerned as it is with the highest of virtues, and the greatest of the commandments, which is To Love. "Thou shalt love the Lord God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." And this commandment is illustrated in the well-known story of the Good Samaritan, who goes out of his way to help a stranger who has been attacked by robbers and is lying by the wayside, someone whom the priests and Pharisees have passed by without a thought.
This then is love, or charity, according to Our Lord. But can we put a face to this kind of charity so that we can recognize true charity when we see it, and learn to practise it more easily? The great and holy convert St. Augustine, asked a similar question in one of his sermons: “What does charity look like anyhow?” And he gives this answer:
“It has hands to help; it has feet to hasten to the poor and needy; it has eyes to see misery and want and suffering; it has ears to hear the sighs and moans of men; and last, but not least,” he says, “it has a heart which can love and bless. That is what love looks like.”
But today I would like to add something to these words of St. Augustine. Because when I try to picture someone, I don’t usually think of their eyes and ears, or of their hands, and certainly never their feet. I think of their face. Let's put a face to this abstract idea of charity. Let's know truly what love looks like. For the face of love is the face of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
It is no coincidence that this year, the 12th Sunday after Pentecost, with its Gospel of the Good Samaritan, falls within the Octave of the Assumption. (An Octave, by the way, which was so unhappily suppressed by the modernist liturgical reformers barely four or five years after Pope Pius XII had defined the dogma of the Assumption in 1950.) During this Octave (which we do celebrate in the traditional Catholic liturgy of the Confraternity), our thoughts are constantly on our blessed Mother. How fitting that the story of the Good Samaritan should interject itself into these thoughts. That this great parable of love should mingle with our meditations upon Our Lady assumed into heaven. For now we know that this image of Our Lady being taken up to her eternal reward and everlasting glory is the true Face of Love.
What do I mean by this? Why is Our Lady the true face of love? Think about it. Think of all the titles of Our Lady that you can remember: Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Our Lady of Good Counsel, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted, and so on. If you reflect on each of these titles, you will come to the realization that every one of them somehow reflects the love Our Lady has for us. Are you storm-tossed on your journey through life? "Star of the Sea, pray for us!" Are you or a loved one suffering from some terrible malady? "Health of the Sick, pray for us!" With every name we call Our Lady, every attempt we make to describe her under some aspect or another, we are acknowledging her care, her protection, her guidance, her counseling, her healing... in short, her love.
And if you wanted to choose just one title for Our Lady which encapsulates all these other names, what would you pick? Think back to the words of St. Augustine: “What does love look like? Above all, it has a heart, which can love and bless. This is what love looks like.” What a wonderful thing then, that this coming Wednesday is the great feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. For this title surely, more than all others, describes Our Lady as the Face of Love.
But let us return to the image of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as being the Face of Love. Do you need to be reminded of some examples of that love? To begin with, let us remember how Mary, as the perfect embodiment of Motherhood, cared for the physical necessities of her Son, first as an infant in the stable at Bethlehem, feeding him when he was hungry, wrapping him in swaddling clothes to keep his little body warm, and then later fleeing to Egypt to protect him from the evil wiles of King Herod, presenting him to God in the temple, seeking him when he was lost in Jerusalem. And later still, see her anguish when she was unable to relieve her Son in his bitter Passion on Calvary, see how the terrible sword which Simeon had foretold, was plunged into that Immaculate Heart.
And then let us remember all the ways the Blessed Mother cares for Our Lord’s Mystical Body. For his Church. For us. Our Lord passed on to us the privilege of being children of Mary, when he gave her to us with his dying words from the Cross. "Mother, behold thy son." And Our Lady did not take that responsibility lightly. Indeed, the ways in which Our Lady cares for us are numberless, far too many for us to list, and too personal perhaps for us to talk about. Our lives are constant examples of Our Lady's loving care. Perhaps, when you have a moment, read through the Litany of Loreto and its many titles of the Blessed Virgin. See how in each title, Our Lady has shown her love for you, and after each invocation utter a fervent “Ora pro nobis!”
In return for the love our Mother heaps upon us, let us return this love to her in some small way. The best way of doing this is to imitate her Immaculate Heart in loving God above all and then our neighbour as ourself. “Love one another, as I have loved you,” said Our Lord, and who better followed his commandment than his blessed Mother? Let us follow in her holy footsteps.
But how do we love our neighbour? I know it is sometimes not easy for modern men in particular to show outward affection, or love. It is regarded as somehow not “cool”, not “macho”. But who among these "macho men" can honestly say that they never loved their mother. You see, God created us with a human nature, both women and men. He gave us all a natural, biological, mother, and for men to love their mother is, after all, natural. There is a story for example, of a hardened criminal on death row, who begged the prison chaplain to be allowed to see his mother one last time before his execution.
This love we all have for our mothers is God's way of showing us how we should love all men. And above all other mothers, Our Lord gave us his Blessed Mother, so that we can love her, and in so doing, be inspired, by her love for us and the love she bears to all God's children, to imitate her and have the strength and courage truly to love our neighbour as ourself.
The famous Capuchin preacher, Father Venantius of New York City, put it this way:
“How often do we find a prodigal Catholic, who for years lived a life of sin in that far country Christ speaks of? But the thought of his heavenly Mother, or the rosary of his First Communion which was still in his possession, or the little picture his mother gave him when he left home, or the Ave Maria he had been saying daily at the request of his dying mother, obtained for him the grace of conversion on his deathbed. It is like the last little leaf on a tree. As long as that one little leaf is still green, there is still life. When it falls, all is gone; the last hope is lost; and the tree, naked and bare, is ready to be cut down and cast into the fire!--Vita! Dulcedo! Et Spes nostra! Salve!”
So let us love one another, without fear, without embarrassment, but unashamedly and as Christians. I am reminded of the words of a Protestant hymn they used to sing in the old Methodist chapels of Yorkshire: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” And I wonder sometimes--will they? Look around at the world, so full of stories of hatred and vengeance, acts of violence and even murder, the unprovoked modern-day holocaust waged against the unborn. Can this world of sin look at our own little world of traditional Catholics, and say, as the pagans did in the time of the early Roman persecutions: "See these Christians. See how much they love one another.”? When Our Lord washed his disciples' feet the night of the Last Supper, he told us flat out: “By this will all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love for one another.” Do all men know that you are the disciples of Christ?
What can we do to change? To make reparation for our lack of charity in the past? With the Face of Love ever before us to show us the way, let us from now on imitate our blessed Mother, and for the love of God, for the love of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, let us stop forever finding faults in our neighbour. Let us stop dwelling on his lack of this or that virtue, his bad behaviour, his slights towards us, real or imaginary, even his wickedness if such there be. God will take care of all that. Let us rather think of him through the eyes of charity, as the infant he once was in the arms of his mother, helpless and needful. Let us find the ways to help him, to bring him mercy as he lays by the wayside, and to forgive him his trespasses, as only then, please God, will our own be forgiven.
And then, maybe, we can become true shining beacons of charity, illuminating the darkness of this world with our love of God and neighbour. We can become magnets of our Faith, attracting men to the truth of our religion by the love and goodness we show to them and to all.
Pray during this Octave of Our Lady assumed into heaven, pray today on this feast of St. John Eudes, and pray especially on the feast of her Immaculate Heart on Wednesday, that she will help us develop our love of God and neighbour, this greatest of all virtues that will abide when Faith and Hope have passed away. Pray that she will take our stone-cold hearts, replacing them with a heart like unto hers, ablaze with the love of her Son, Jesus Christ, and of all her children. For we are all her children. We all have the same Mother. And so they are all in a very true sense our brothers and sisters. In the name of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and with her shining Face of Love ever before us, let us never do to them as the pharisees did to the Good Samaritan. Let us never pass them by.
Cal
August 20, 2012 - 3:17 AM
Let me add another thanks for this Sermon. I only get to go to a Traditional Mass once a month so finding this was a blessing today. I will check each Sunday for a sermon to read before my spiritual communion.
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Francis D Davis
August 19, 2012 - 12:19 PM
Thank you for this sermon. I have not been acatholic for all that long. 11 years to be exact. Having a relationship with our Mother has always been a difficult one. I have always acknowledged her with my head. But this sermon has helped me toward acknowledging her with my heart. Again, thank you.