This week we Lectio the Liturgy with the Collect for the 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time.
Grant us, Lord our God, that we may honor you with all our mind, and love everyone in truth of heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever
In The Ages of the Interior Life, Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP write that the soul has two different regions in it. One region belongs to the sensible order, which includes the external senses, the other region is the suprasensible, or the intellectual order.
Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange then teaches that from the intellectual regions of our soul springs forth two higher faculties, the intellect and the will.
St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the intellect is responsible for understanding, while the will encompasses decision-making and desire.
The intellect is the faculty of thought, it is a part of the mind. The intellect signifies the higher, spiritual, cognitive power of the soul.
The will is faculty of choice. The will allows us to act and choose. We find both, the intellect and the will in this week’s prayer.
Our first request in the prayer is part of our intellect, that we would honor God with all our mind. As I meditated on this prayer, I found that to honor God with our mind is more than just to think good thoughts.
The mind is often referred to as a battlefield because the intellect involves the intentional use of your God-given mind to seek truth, discern wisdom, and deepen an understanding of divine revelation, and that’s not as easy as it sounds.
We must remember that we have an enemy that wants us to do the opposite. Satan wants to keep our mind so occupied with other things that there is no thought of God or holy things.
The mind is also where we meet God. What we experience in our senses, the taste of the communion host, the words of the prayer, are processed in the mind, where we experience the presence of God. This is why what is in our mind matters. Our mind honors God when it is filled with His word, and whatever is “true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise” (Phil 4:8).
Our desire that God would grant that we love everyone in truth of heart, comes from our will and from our heart. God has given us the grace to love others, and still, it takes an act of the will to love.
To love in truth of heart is to love with authenticity. I am well aware of those people in our lives who are hard to love, I mean, how can we love someone who has set out to hurt us? When I’ve prayed into this dilemma, God reminded that that person has a soul, too, and He wants that soul in Heaven, just like He wants me. Even when I choose not to be with that person, I can still love them like God does because their soul matters.
When I took the time to think about it, this Collect presented some challenges. We ask that our mind be a place worthy of the presence of God and that our love be genuine and sincere to all. However, hard the may seem, we can also be assured that there is no difficulty that is greater than God’s grace.