31st Sunday in Ordinary Time 2024

Deep calls to deep

at the thunder of thy cataracts;

all thy waves and thy billows

have gone over me.

By day the Lord commands his steadfast love;

and at night his song is with me,

a prayer to the God of my life.

(Psalm 42:7-8)

To enter into the deep is to encounter Love—the tempests and waves reside on the surface, but Love abides in the deep. It is for this reason that Christ instructs that the greatest commandment is you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. Love calls to Love, deep to deep, and through love we are drawn to depths beyond the reach of the fiercest turmoils.

The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. Have you ever wondered why bitter people are so superficial? Or why the narcissist is so shallow? In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, sin darkens the intellect, but it also makes us paper cutouts of men. Wafer thin, easily damaged, and blown about by every gust. Virtue fleshes us out, gives us weight, and allows us to enter the deep. Love calls to Love, and to love our neighbor is to love the image of God found in him.

Who is our neighbor? Quite simply, the one to whom we are closest. Your spouse is your first neighbor, your children next, your family, your friends, the person who lives beside you, the members of your parish, the members of your town, your fellow countrymen. Patriotism, says the Church, is a form of love of neighbor. But our

order of priorities must be set rightly. If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar. (1 John 4:20) Love calls to love, and to respond in love is to forgive and to cherish—for love covers a multitude of sins. (1 Peter 4:8) To refuse love of neighbor, then, is to refuse Love Himself. Selfishness is the anathema of love, narcissism

its poison—and if love of money is the root of all evil, then hatred is the currency of Hell itself, for what selfishness disregards, hatred pays with cruelty and spite.

Duc in altum—put out into the deep! Our Lord instructs wisely. The Deep calls to deep, Love calls us when we love, and when we abandon ourselves to that vast intimacy, we will there fill our nets with the abundance of Life, and that life will be the light of men—the beacon which others will follow—for deep calls to deep. Love ever points the way to the fathomless depths of Love Himself.