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

Mike Schmitz· Host0:00

Saint John Paul II at one point, he said, "The opposite of love is not hate." What do you think he said it was? Hi, my name's Father Mike Schmitz, and this is Ascension Presents. You know that in the Bible, if you're looking at Genesis one and Genesis chapter two, you realize that, 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 us 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 Catechism says it like this. It says, "Jesus reveals the innermost secret of God." What is the innermost secret of God? That God is an eternal exchange of love. Basically, another way to say it is the innermost secret of God, like, is that God is love. Love isn't just something God does, but love is who God is. If you're made in God's image and likeness, the innermost secret of you [chuckles] 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. And yet what happens is, well, Genesis one and two reveal this as all good. [laughs] We're made for that. Genesis three reveals the brokenness and the introduction of brokenness. And so now, from now on, we all have distortions. We have a distortion of labor, we have a distortion of leisure, and we experience a distortion of love. So what's the distortion of love? This is 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