3 November 2021

Wednesday of the Thirty-First Week in Ordinary Time 

God is the one absolute; next to Him, everything created is relative. As the Lord makes clear in today’s Gospel (Lk 14:25-33), this applies even to the goods of family and of life itself: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” While these words of Jesus may strike us as harsh, they reveal a way of looking at created things that will allow us to love them most perfectly. If we love family or life or any created thing in a way that displaces God, then we invert the order of creation, since God is the source of life, the origin of our families, and the creator of everything that exists. He alone is the source of creation’s goodness, so next to God, we ought to “hate” everything else.

If we can learn to see all of creation as coming from God and place the Lord at the center of our lives, then we will find, as many of the saints did, that the entire world is shot through with God. As Hopkins says, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God,” and as such it is to be loved—but always as a gift, as something second to the Creator. Today, let us pray for the grace to love creation rightly, as a gift which comes from the Lord, and so acknowledge its true goodness as that which reveals God’s splendor.