If You're Doing This, It's Not Love (w/ Fr. Mike Schmitz)

0:00St. John Paul, the second at one point, he said, the opposite of love is not hate. What do you think he said it was? How my name's Father Mike Schmitz, and this is a sense of resistance. You know that in the Bible, if you're looking at Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, you realize that what we're made for, I've talked about this so many times, we're made for at least three things, right? We're made for labor. You know, God works, he puts in the garden to work, made for leisure. He rests on the seventh day. We're called to enter into his rest. And he made us to share in maybe God's deepest identity. The Catholicism says it like this. It says Jesus reveals the innermost secret of God. What is the innermost secret of God? The God is an eternal exchange of love. Basically another way to say it is, the innermost secret of God is that God is love. Love isn't just something God does, but love is who God is. If you're making God's image and likeness, the innermost secret of you is that you're made for love. So we're made for three things. For labor, for leisure, and for love. It's our call. And in some ways, that love is our deepest identity.

1:01And yet what happens is, well, Genesis 1 and 2 reveal this is all good. We're made for that. Genesis 3 reveals the brokenness and the introduction of brokenness. And so now, from now on, we all have distortions. We have distortion of labor. We have distortion of leisure. And we experience a distortion of love. So what's the distortion of love? Who's what John Paul II was getting at? He said the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love, he said, is use. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is use. That would say that's one of the distortions of love. There's another distortion of love. We can see what John Paul is saying. The opposite of love is love is what? Love is willing the good of the other. Right? So love is willing to go together. And yet, what is use? Use is willing to use the other, right? To it recognizes the usefulness of the other person. Recognize the fact that this person has something that could benefit me. Has something that I want. That's a trap, right? Instead of it being a gaze of love, this gaze of,

2:02I can will, I can choose the good of this other person. Now it's work and I take. Use doesn't have to always be lust. That's often how it is. But also it could be manipulation. It could be getting one over on someone. You're probably one over on someone. You're tricking them or fooling them. So that now I have something that I wanted that the use dev stealing. Like that could be using them, right? Doesn't have to just be lust. But I see something in you that's potentially valuable for me. That's use. But the other extreme, the other distortion of love, it's kind of sneaky. Another distortion of love is indifference. Love is willing to go to the other. It's seeing the other and choosing their good. Use, oh no, I'm gonna take whatever I find valuable from you. Indifference is looking at another and saying, oh, I'm not even acknowledging you. I'm not even noticing you. I'm not even necessarily even seeing you. It's as if you don't exist. For the use, it's okay. What I value in you is what you can give me.

3:05Indifference is, oh, there's no value here. Never mind. Pass. Swipe left. Whatever that thing is. Just moving on. Both of these are a distortion of love. A love is willing the good of the other, choosing the good of the other. Use is I wanna take whatever I find valuable. And indifference is an unwillingness or an inability to see the good in the other, to see the dignity of the other. And again, this could be our whole day. In fact, for many of us, we could say like, I really try not to use people. I really try not to either use people lustfully or try not to use people in a manipulative way. I try not to use people when it comes to stealing from them or lying or whatever getting what I try not to take. From others. And that'd be great. That'd be great. At the same time, how often do we give ourselves a pass in simply ignoring people and being indifferent to not even just their suffering, but being indifferent to their existence?

4:06We just walk past people day after day and don't even notice the fact that this is another person made in God's image and likeness. C.S. Lewis wrote about this, or he was talking about if we could only see, if we could only see the truth of every, even just the most ordinary human being, if we saw the reality, the spiritual reality of what is standing, what kind of being is standing in front of us or walking past us on the street. He said, we'd either be tempted to run in horror because of the distortion we can do ourselves by sin or we'd be tempted to bow down in worship because seeing the image of God in so many ways unscored and yet we're indifferent, how many people do you and I pass within difference and we think that's fine. That's fine. That's fine. I'm not using them, right? I'm not using the opposite of love is use. So I'm not using them. That's fine. I can just walk past them and be indifferent to them. And yet, both use and indifference are distortions

5:10of our deepest identity. Distortions of, in fact, our highest call, right? Jesus said, the great commandment is to love the Lord God with all your heart, my soul and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself the second greatest commandment. Use and indifference both violate the second great commandment to love our neighbor as ourself. So what do we call to? Well, I would say John Paul said, we're called the Chastity. Chastity, where did that come from? I don't know, or I guess it makes sense when it comes to use, lust and no in chastity. But John Paul II said this, he said, Chastity, what is it essentially entails a quickness to affirm the dignity of the other person? The essence of chastity is the quickness to affirm the dignity of the other person. So if we see someone and we want to use them for however we want to use them, whether they do lust or some other way, the essence of chastity is a quickness to affirm their dignity. Like, no, that person does not exist for me to use. That person exists solely to be loved, but also when I want to pass by someone

6:12and like, oh, no, there's nothing in that person that I could use, nothing in that person that offers me anything. So I'm going to be tempted to be indifferent. The essence of chastity is the quickness to affirm the dignity of the person that we're passing by. We've really hollered out the word chastity. If that's what chastity really is, we have really emptied it of the beautiful richness of what it's meant to be. The essence of chastity is the quickness to affirm the dignity of the other human being, other person. You and I can exercise chastity every single day. And I don't just mean we're not going to lust after people. What I mean is to quickly acknowledge this is a human being. Man, it got image or likeness. This is a human being of great incredible goodness. This is a human being who's worth loving. To have that kind of view, that kind of perspective, to that kind of look in our eyes, reflecting the truth in our hearts, would be amazing. And that is actually what you're made for.

7:14Love, your deepest identity. So how do we exercise that today? Equickness. For every person we come across, to affirm the dignity of every human being. Anyways, from all of us here to such presents, my name's Father Mike. God bless.