The Right Way To Love Our Neighbor
When our Lord confirmed which are the greatest of the commandments, he placed God as our first priority and then our neighbor. First, love God with all your heart and mind and soul, and secondly, love your neighbor as yourself. We should never place our love for our neighbor above our love for God. We should not love any particular person more than we love God. Young people in particular have some difficulty understanding these priorities. When young people, or old people for that matter, “fall in love”, for example, they experience a kind of euphoria, an overwhelming emotion that takes over their whole being. They have a hard time comprehending that their love for God needs to be greater than the blissful emotions they are experiencing for another person. The reason they don’t understand is because they confuse the emotion, the sentimental feeling of love with what constitutes true love, namely, the willingness (and even desire) to sacrifice their own will for the sake of the person loved. They recognize that their feelings for their beloved runs higher right now than their love for God. But remember, that’s just “feelings”.
The priority we must give to our love for God is simply a question of that willingness to give up what we want to do out of love for God. For example when a young person is dating, it’s very easy for them to yield to temptations against the sixth commandment. The human body has a natural desire for pleasure, sure, but that’s not all—the human mind has an equally natural desire to consummate romantic, sentimental love in a physical way. The combination of mind and body at war with our higher intellect provides for a very dangerous scenario in which we yearn to satisfy our love for a human being, even though we know it goes against the law God gave us. It can be boiled down to a simple choice: are we going to “love” our neighbor more than we love God? Or are we willing to sacrifice our lower instincts in order to please God by submitting our will to his?
It’s the old story, one that is repeated in different ways for different commandments. But it’s always the same decision we have to make, “Who is more important, God or our neighbor?” We know the answer, but as usual the spirit is willing and the flesh weak. It’s our daily battle and one we must ultimately win if we want to avoid the loss of heaven and the pains of hell.
In the case of dating, and even more dangerously in the case of extra-marital “interests”, there is a consideration we should make that might help us get through our temptations. If we truly “love” a person, we should want what’s best for them. If our love for God isn’t enough to keep us out of trouble, how about our love for that person we have feelings for? Can we place the love for that person above the love for our own pleasures and feelings? Do we really want to lead that person into mortal sin if we love them so much? Are we really prepared to drag them down to hell? Or is our love for them great enough to be classified as true love, founded on the spirit of self-sacrifice and not just “feelings”? Can we love them enough to make those sacrifices?
As I mentioned earlier, many are tempted even after they are married to seek consolations and excitement outside of their marriage. God does not want this. It will destroy your marriage, it will do untold damage to your children, it will destabilize the home and end up making your life a living hell. Put a firm leash on any feelings you might perceive as rising above the ordinary in your relationships with other people. Be prepared to endure an unhappy marriage rather than seeking solace elsewhere. If you’ve made the vow to be faithful “for better for worse”, find the strength to remain loyal to that vow and to your spouse, no matter how miserable they may be making your life, no matter even if they don’t keep their side of the bargain. Your sacrifice may be difficult, it may even be heroic, but it’s what God expects from your promise to him.
God’s will in all these matters has been made clear by two thousand years of the Church’s teachings on faith and morals, based on Christ’s own teachings and the natural law itself. In fact, the stark simplicity of God’s law could not be clearer, and no matter how much we try to find a way around it, we keep coming back to the ideal of monogamy within a loving home and a loving marriage as the only way to provide a meaningful outlet for our romantic and physical appetites as well as a stable environment in which to raise children. To achieve this, it is incumbent on those who choose marriage as their life’s vocation to ensure at every step of the way that they place their love of God above even their love of their spouse. And certainly, that love of God must be kept far above our own superficial feelings and petty attachments to romance, sentimentality and pleasure. God first, all else will follow.