Attachments and their symptoms

 We are by nature disordered creatures.  We should be at our most elemental level ordered towards and by God but we aren’t.  Therefore we tend to become attached to anything and everything other than God in disordered and inordinate ways, even holy and good things.

The purpose of all holy and good things is to aid us in becoming attached to God, to help us love God and therefore to love our fellow creatures in God-ordered ways.  That is why God gave them to us.  But because we are disordered creatures we tend to lose sight of that purpose and become attached to the aids themselves, things such as the Scriptures, theology, rites, liturgies, music, praise styles, art, you name it.  We can even take the Eucharist in an unworthy manner (1 Corinthians 11).  We can even use prayer in a disordered way.

In last Sunday’s Gospel reading, we saw that loving God and our neighbor as ourselves are the two most important commandments and are both the summary and the basis for all the Law and the Prophets according to Jesus.  But there was much more to the conversation that we don’t want to miss.

The scribe said to him, "Well said, teacher.

You are right in saying,

'He is One and there is no other than he.'

And 'to love him with all your heart,

with all your understanding,

with all your strength,

and to love your neighbor as yourself'

is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices."

And when Jesus saw that he answered with understanding,

he said to him,

"You are not far from the kingdom of God."

Mark 12:33-34 NABRE

The burnt offering and sacrifices were ordained by God as part of the Jewish sacrificial system but love of God and neighbor is of more worth to God, more important to God.  In fact, it is possible and even common for us to participate in the liturgy and Sacraments of the Catholic Church and totally miss loving God and people.

Jesus told the Pharisees that they searched the Scriptures because they thought that would give them eternal life but they wouldn’t come to Him, the One the Scriptures pointed to. John 5:39-40

And Jesus also told the Jews that their keeping of the Law was disordered.

The Apostle John said in his first epistle that we can determine whether we love God whom we can’t see by the way we treat or brothers and sisters whom we can see.

There’s a quote attributed to Blaise Pascal that men never do evil more cheerfully than when they do it for (disordered) religious reasons.

We need to frequently do a prayerful, meditative reality check on our true focus and attachments and watch how we treat others for symptoms of disorder.