Yesterday morning I prayed the Office of Readings and encountered a text that caused me to read it multiple times. The connection between scholarly pursuits and an active prayer life has always been critical for my own faith. I suspect this is because of a perhaps excessive fixation in my own self with the intelligibility of reality but as I age I find myself realizing how all pursuit of truth is a pursuit of God’s will. 

This text proposed a rather vexing and existential question for my own vocation. Is it not the case that we can teach others how to love God and love our neighbor? If this is not the case, then what are we all doing here? 

Ordinary time has a way of refining us via unexpected channels!

I am sure you are all on your seat wondering what this text is; the answer to the above question comes from the Detailed Rules for Monks by Saint Basil the Great. I am figuring he is a highly credible source to answer this question since he is one of the original eight doctors of the Church from antiquity. This is what he wrote that shook me:

“Love of God is not something that can be taught. We did not learn from someone else how to rejoice in light or want to live, or to love our parents or guardians. It is the same – perhaps more so – with our love for God: it does not come by another’s teaching. As soon as the living creature (that is, man) comes to be, a power of reason is implanted in us like a seed, containing within the ability and the need to love. When the school of God’s law admits this power of reason, it cultivates it diligently, skillfully, nurtures it, and with God’s help brings it to perfection.” 

Therein lies the paradox: love cannot be taught because God is the best teacher and his lesson is complete! The capacity and need for love is already within each of us. 

But I need proof! I need to know that this makes sense. Saint Basil continues:

“Since we have received a command to love God, we possess from the first moment of our existence an innate power and ability to love. The proof of this to be sought outside ourselves, but each one can learn this from himself and in himself. It is natural for us to want things that are good and pleasing to the eye, even though at first different things seem beautiful and good to different people… What, I ask, is more wonderful than the beauty of God?… What desire is as urgent and overpowering as the desire implanted by God in a soul that is completely purified of sin and cries out in its love: I am wounded by love?” 

Admitting the power of reason is what unlocks the love of God and neighbor. 

This now appears to stabilize the purpose of Catholic education. Our mission admits that truth can be known and that truth is a person. And in the process of learning more about the beauty of all that God made, love is awakened within. 

I like an adventure more than a mystery myself! This sounds like a great adventure! 

If you are interested in praying the Office of Readings, consider visiting divineoffice.org. It is a powerfully humble and emotional prayer that invites God into the deepest parts of our human experience. – Mr. Derek Tremblay, Headmaster