The monthly Holy Sacrifice of the Mass offered for all of my Benefactors/Supporters will be on Saturday May 30th. The day before, on Friday May 29th, the Holy and August Sacrifice of Calvary will be offered for the salvation of the soul of [email protected] . (Note: honestsportstalk shut down his email account about 48 hours after my post went up, so don’t bother sending anything.) If you don’t remember, scroll down to the recent ‘Pollyanna” post and the unredacted email that [email protected] sent me.
Remember, God has known and loved [email protected] for all eternity, since before the creation of the universe. In the fullness of time, God effected the conception of and endowed with a soul honestsportstalk in his mother’s womb. God then knit together, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, honestsportstalk’s body. And then honestsportstalk was born, and he (I’m going with the high odds that this is a male) was his mother’s precious little baby. And he had cute little fingers, and cute little toes, and was very warm and snuggly as sleeping little babies are. And then he grew up, and clearly something along the way went wrong. But God still loved him relentlessly, so much so that God has, does, and always will hold sacred honestsportstalk’s free will.
But, God being God, and His thoughts being far above ours, can take our horrible, horrible decisions and actions, and cause incredible good to come out of them. To wit, honestsportstalk made the horrible free choice a couple of weeks ago to compose and send that email to me. It was a horrific, horrific sin. BUT, because he sent it to me, the Holy Sacrifice will be offered for him. And many, many people are going to set an alarm for roughly 1:00pm Eastern Daylight Time on Friday (ahem, cough, cough, hint, hint), and will stop for a moment, and uniting themselves to the Mass being offered for honestsportstalk, will themselves offer up a prayer for the salvation of the soul of honestsportstalk, along with all of the angels and all of the saints. We won’t know the result until the General Judgment, and honestsportstalk, having free will held sacred by God, may choose not to avail himself of the grace that will be available to him, but I do know that all things are possible through Christ, and that honestsportstalk’s odds will be better after than they were before.
This is what “love your enemies” and “pray for your enemies” means. This is what “love your neighbor” means. I have no desire to meet honestsportstalk IN THIS WORLD. But, I am desirous of the salvation of his soul, and hopefully meeting him in heaven, and gazing upon the Beatific Vision together with him, simply because God made Him, God loves Him, and God Incarnated and died for Him.
The mantra among men in post-Christian culture is , “He/she/they aren’t my problem.” Well, it seems to me that the definition of charity is to voluntarily choose to make someone outside of yourself “your problem”. In the broadest sense is agape love, the love of humankind, which is the sort of love one feels for someone like honestsportstalk. Because God loves honestsportstalk, and because honestsportstalk’s path crossed mine, the choice is then put before me: do I make honestsporistalk’s salvation my problem? I choose “yes” because God chose “yes”, both with regards to honestsportstalk AND with regards to me. Do you know what the ultimate expression of choosing to make someone else “my problem” looks like? Here. Let me show you.
Things Jesus Never Said: “You’re not My problem.”
Filial love, or brotherly love, is to say to another on a more intimate and direct level that you freely choose to make them “your problem”. Hence:
A faithful friend is a strong defence: and he that hath found him, hath found a treasure. Nothing can be compared to a faithful friend, and no weight of gold and silver is able to countervail the goodness of his fidelity. A faithful friend is the medicine of life and immortality: and they that fear the Lord, shall find him. He that feareth God, shall likewise have good friendship: because according to him shall his friend be. Ecclesiasticus 6: 14-17
Erotic love chooses to make another person “your problem” by marrying them and becoming one unit in the eyes of God. Their estates are combined, and, God willing, their DNA is combined, thus making each spouse the other’s “problem” to the extent of literally creating new human beings for which they are together responsible. For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health… in other words, “all of your problems I now make my problems too.”
So, if you love someone, you should go right now and tell them, “You are my problem, and I’m so glad that you are,” because that’s just another way to say “I love you.”