A Holy Sense of Duty - and Love

The Catholic Thing

By Father Jerry J. Pokorsky.
The Catholic calendar carries this noteworthy designation on various dates: "Holy Day of Obligation." The Church requires us to attend Mass in order to honor the Third Commandment. Those of us present at Mass should comply with a sense of duty. A properly directed sense of duty is holy and good. But salvation does not come from dutiful compliance alone.
A sense of duty maintains families. Fathers, as good husbands, dutifully keep schedules, go to work to put food on the table, and pay the rent. Mothers are also dutiful, as good wives, in their motherly tasks, making the home a domestic church. A baby rewards maternal solicitude with its first word, mama.
By vocation and circumstance, thoughtful single folks often have an intensely focused sense of duty, dedicating their lives to endeavors that benefit the local community and the whole world. Priests dutifully prepare and execute a parish schedule with Masses, Confessions, and Baptisms. Duty motivates workers to make the trains run on time. Duty builds and defends nations. A sense of duty is a cornerstone to efficiency, productivity, and getting the job done.
We fulfill our religious duty to keep the Sabbath by attending Mass on Sundays and holy days.
But fulfilling our obligation to attend Mass is sterile without love. An excessively efficient priest damages his prayer life. (Church law prohibits priests from celebrating an excessive number of Masses.) We risk reducing Mass attendance to clock-watching - especially the odious and absolutely horrible practice of checking watches during a priest's, no doubt, eloquent homiletic remarks. Those with a truncated sense of duty habitually come late to Mass or depart early to beat the traffic.
Duty needs our love.
Most Catholics love the reality of the Mass with its myriad symbols and human relationships. The squawking of children is beautiful and enriches the sacramental realism of the mass. But Mary likely walked out of the synagogue when baby Jesus was crying for food or change of diaper. (There isn't an account of that in the Gospel of Luke, but there should be.) We love the conversation in the narthex after mass. Married and single alike find loving consolation in the worship of God in our parish communities. The Mass and its aftermath are often unintentionally holy (and not-so-holy) sit-coms. Love endures all things.
But our sense of duty fortified by our love cannot save us from reality broken by our sins. As sinners, we have an abiding subliminal sense we are unlovable or incapable of love. Surveys reveal that 99.9 percent of the entire world is love-deprived. The remaining 0.1 percent are, I suspect, lying. Only God's love can heal the reality of our wounded human dignity and the guilty memory of our sinful betrayals.
Saint John the Apostle writes: "This is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." (1 John 4:10-12) We attend Mass to give thanks for God's love and His infallible offer of forgiveness.
Need evidence of His love? Gaze upon that Cross above the altar: "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13) Too harsh for Christmas sensibilities? Gaze upon that Nativity scene: "Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger." (Luke 2:10-12)
A helpless Child attracts the love and worship of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, and the Magi. God and man are reconciled in a Child born of the Virgin. Heaven and earth are reconciled in Bethlehem. The very name of Bethlehem prefigures His saving mission: the "House of Bread," the superabundant Bread of the Blessed Eucharist, the Bread of eternal life ...