27th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Cycle B
October 3, 2021
Our Lady of Grace Parish, Parkton 5pm, 8:30 and 11am
The Healing of Our Inner Self
Over the last two years, I have been participating in several Internet Zoom groups.
One of these is especially interesting. There are eight of us in this group, three women and five men: two from Texas, a surgeon and a businessman; two from Washington, D.C., a professor at Georgetown and a lobbyist; one from Pennsylvania, a psychologist; and three from Maryland, a C.P.A., another priest and me.
The one thing that brought us together is that we have all been on a retreat at Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist Monastery in South Carolina. So, this is a prayerful, reflective group.
We meet once a month on Zoom and we always focus on some podcast that we agreed to listen to in advance. In the past year, we listened to a presentation by an author named Don Bisson.
Bisson is a Christian, a Catholic, and a PhD psychologist. The topic of his presentation was the healing of our inner self.
In one section, Don Bisson was talking about love, especially love in marriage. He makes the point that love is not primarily a feeling.
Naturally, we like to have warm feelings of love, and it’s great when we have these, but love is not always a feeling. Instead, Bisson says: it is essentially a choice – a choice that we make.
The Choice of Love
So, especially in marriage, love is a choice to take the first step – to show affection or do something affirming. It is a choice to remember the good or endearing traits of the other person.
Love is a choice to be happy about the accomplishments of the other. It is also a choice to be there for the other in times of disappointment.
Love is a choice to share both my successes and my failures. It is a choice to be vulnerable.
Love is a choice to apologize and ask for forgiveness. It is also a choice to be forgiving and to try to move on together.
Love is a choice to be patient with idiosyncrasies. It is also a choice to remain aware that I have my own stuff that may get on the nerves of the other person.
Love is a choice to listen. It is a choice to take in the words and also the feelings that are underneath the words of the other person.
And very importantly, love is a choice to live with the big picture of life in mind. It is a choice to let bumps in the road that will be meaningless a year from now just be bumps in the road.
Why Choice Is Important
So, this idea of love as a choice is important.
One reason I say this is that we live in a culture of instant gratification. We are used to getting what we want fast.
I can do a Google search on my iPhone and learn who was President in 1880 within seconds. I can heat a dinner in a microwave in a minute.
So, wonderful advances have led us to get used to quick or instant gratification. But, we all know that life isn’t always that way.
In relationships and especially in marriage, certain tough times will not be fixed or healed that quickly. We need to choose to hang in there “in good times and in bad, in sickness and health.”
These are my thoughts in response to Jesus’ teaching in the gospel about the permanence of marriage. The insight about love as being a choice helps us to live Jesus’ teaching.
God’s Choice to Love
I want to conclude with just one more quick thought.
God chooses to love us even when there is the break-up of a marriage. I want to be clear about this because all of us know someone whose marriage has ended.
This is humanity; it is human life, and God chooses to love us when this happens. Our Church has some ways of our coming to peace and moving on when this happens.
They are imperfect, but they are better than they used to be in expressing God’s choice to love us no matter what. Today, let’s just remember the importance of choosing to love.
