One of my favorite books is by Norbertine priest and spiritual director Alfred McBride, O. PRAEM, a prolific writer on the faith, titled: The Ten Commandments: Sounds of Love from Sinai (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1990). McBride looks at the Ten Commandments from a positive value of each, as opposed to the more common view as restrictive laws. In receiving the commandments, Moses experienced a God of love and of covenant. In response, the Hebrew people “enshrined this love covenant and its dynamic values at the heart of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible (The Ten Commandments can be found in Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21).” The root meaning of Torah is “to see” or “to guide.”
McBride explains that God is not a “dean of discipline,” but that the Ten Commandments serve a dynamic purpose, to awaken in us new ways to love God, self and others, as pilgrims on a life-long faith journey.
By way of example, the first commandment is “I, the LORD, am your God…You shall not have other gods besides me.” (Deuteronomy 5:6-7). According to McBride, the purpose of the First Commandment is to invite faith in the real God. But even the ancient people faltered and created a golden bull calf to worship, a false god. He asks, “Is it an accident that Wall Street uses a symbol of a bull (shades of the golden calf) to symbolize the escalating accumulation of money?”
For McBride, the Christian believer needs to be open to the Holy Spirit, as one’s faith grows, expands and deepens over a lifetime from a grade school understanding, through adulthood and into the sunset years, through seasons of the faith journey. Why? Because real faith “involves a developing person. Such a person should grow by exploring life’s experience with the Spirit’s guidance.”
The breakthrough, explains McBride, begins when “we get in touch with the mystery of our internal lives and indeed the mystery of all existence.” We become willing to let Jesus be Jesus - man and God, teacher and savior, model and sanctifier. We more graciously accept grace and personal freedom, heaven and earth and all spiritual realities, rather than denying their polarity, writes McBride. And what happens next?
“We now begin to earn our faith the old-fashioned way, with our noses rubbed into the pain and suffering of life. Death of loved ones and the pain of loss challenge our faith to deepen. Slightly embarrassed about our long love affair with control, we venture slowly into the long and hugely satisfying process of letting go, permitting the grandeur of God to lead us. We respond more easily to calls to prayer and contemplation, to silence and reflection. These are the colors of autumn, hues of feeling at home in faith. Instead of fighting God, we join God. Providentially, our faith now seems more vivid than ever, even as the sorrows of later years begin to accumulate.”
In the last years of life, “faith is most mysterious because our relationship with God is like love beyond words. St. Paul describes it this way: '…I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me (Galatians 2:20).'” Without feeling the loss of freedom, such people seem to know the world as God does, to love people like God does, to perceive the presence of God in the ordinary events of life, McBride writes.
McBride points out that some people who live by faith transform the world around them, even whole societies, like St. Catherine of Siena, who helped to end the Avignon papacy. They experience enemies as people to be loved and the sinner as someone to be redeemed. Saints are the most evident examples of this stage.
The First Commandment, therefore, is a gateway, an invitation, to an exciting and soul-satisfying pilgrimage of faith and we will succeed, says McBride, if we resolutely walk the path of faith throughout the seasons of our life, aided at every moment by the Holy Spirit.
