This week, I’m featuring short excerpts from my book, A Well-Built Faith, focusing on the 4 pillars of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Here’s a brief look at the third pillar: the Moral Life.
Country and Western songs tend to be filled with heart ache, telling tales of good loving gone bad. Two people in love are supposed to treat each other in a certain way and when that doesn’t happen, relationships faith. Just as certain actions express that love, other actions express rejection of that love.
God is in love with us and he is inviting us to love him and one another in return. If we say that we love God, then we are supposed to act in ways that express that love and avoid actions that show rejection of that love. It’s that simple.
Then why is it so hard?
Living a moral life seems like it should be so easy. There are only 10 rules to follow (the Commandments) and, God is so wonderful and loving, who would ever dream of doing wrong by him? The painful truth is, we human beings are never satisfied. We always want more. Our hungry hearts seek satisfaction in places and things other than God. Like a married person who seems to “have it all” but still goes off to have an affair, we can all too easily forget how good God is to us and instead, go off to seek fulfillment elsewhere.
Living the moral life is not a matter of simply avoiding bad things. It is a matter of recognizing how loved we are and then responding to that love in the way our beloved – God – asks us to: by seeking fulfillment only in him and by loving our neighbors. God is faithful to us and we cannot hurt God through our immoral actions. The only hearts that risk becoming “achey-breaky” are our own.
Leave a Reply