Mary, Queen of Peace Catholic Church Bossier City, LA

Mary Queen of Peace, Bossier City, La

2 days ago

Play

🕊️Oct 25, 2026
#Homily by Father Karl Daigle
🥖Bread for the Journey
30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle A-2026

Here at Mary Queen of Peace, many of us are big fans of the LSU Tigers and the New Orleans Saints. We love to cheer on our beloved Tigers with slogans such as ”Geaux Tigers” spelled with a cajun flair, and to heckle opponents and their fans with the infamous “Tiger Bait.” When it comes to the Saints, we rally around them through the cherished slogan of ”Who Dat.” I really wanted to use the football slogans of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Notre Dame, but I did not want you to “boo me” out of the church. These slogans add to the excitement of our game day experience and help stir into flame our spirit of fandom.

If there was ever slogan that was a rallying cry for our discipleship with Jesus Christ, it is powerfully captured in our Gospel reading. The slogan is none other than the Great Commandment proclaimed by Jesus in the following words: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In short, Love God. Love Neighbor. In uttering these words, Jesus was summarizing for the Jewish legal scholars, the 613 commandments of the Torah or the sacred text of Judaism. This summary involved a synthesis of Deuteronomy 6:5(Love God) with Leviticus 19:18(Love your neighbor). In doing so, Jesus revealed that LOVE is the very soul of the commandments. Love, properly understood and applied, is the cornerstone of God’s will in all things.

Jewish adults celebrated and embraced the slogan of the Great Commandment in some rather interesting and clever ways. They wore black leather boxes containing the great commandment on their arm and forehead during morning prayer to bind God’s word to their thoughts and actions. They placed written scrolls of the Great Commandment in a plastic case and attached it to the right side of their home and office doorframes as a reminder of their faith, identity, and union with God. They would wear fringes on the corners of four cornered garments or prayer shawls to help them remember and obey all of God’s commandments. As Catholic Christians, what can we do, or what can we wear, to help keep the great Commandment of God on our minds, lips, and hearts? How about the crucifix where the love of God and neighbor come together in the highest form of sacrificial love? Whether we do that or not, that is not a requirement, we are called to be lovers of God’s commandments and joyful promoters of them in the home, workplace, and in our personal encounters.

The Great Commandment is deeply connected to the Decalogue or Ten Commandments. The first four(4) remind of us our devotion and responsibilities towards God. We are called to love God with our whole being by choosing Him over our idols, desires, and self-interests. The remaining six(6) remind us of our responsibilities towards our neighbor. We are called to love our neighbor by treating them with the same care, respect, and dignity, that we expect to receive from other people. The Great Commandment reveals that our love for God is to take priority over everyone and everything. Even in our treatment and service of others, we are doing it first and foremost as an expression of our love for God and all that He has made. The first and second parts of the Great Commandment ultimately come together as one because the Sacred Scriptures reveal that if we do not love others, we do not love God, and we only love God to the degree that we love other people. Nonetheless, it always begins with the love of God, and this love flows into our daily interactions and relationships.

It is important reflect on Jesus’s call to love our neighbors as ourselves. If we love ourselves in a healthy and grounded manner, there tends to be no problem. But what if we don’t love ourselves as we are called to? What if we do not properly respect, value, celebrate, or protect ourselves? How will that affect our ability to love? The following are some possibilities. We may be afraid to give and receive love. We may struggle to give and receive love in healthy and holy ways. We may find it a challenge to treat others with dignity and respect. We may find it difficult to affirm and encourage other people. We may not know how to protect and defend others in their time of need. As we grow in authentic self-love as a beloved child of God, we will gradually go to the next level in how we love our neighbor, and Jesus reveals that everyone is our neighbor.

Jesus actually takes the love of neighbor to an even higher spiritual plane whenever He proclaims: “Love one another, as I have loved you.” Therefore, the ultimate standard is not how much we love ourselves, even though as I stated earlier, that is extremely important in the love of neighbor. There is more to it. We are to mirror and enflesh the love of Jesus Christ for every person we encounter. It is matter of how we allow Jesus to love, care, and show mercy, in and through His Spirit dwelling in our hearts.

Since the dawn of time, one of the most cherished and debated topics within the human family has been the reality of love. What is true love? What is authentic Christian love? As a lived out experience, love can be equally delightful, confusing, fulfilling, disappointing, and infuriating. From a faith perspective, how can we distinguish between true love and false love. True love involves a willingness to embrace various forms of sacrificial love. False love is primarily motivated by convenience and personal benefit. True love is anchored in the revealed truth of God that comes to us through the Bible and church teaching. False love is rooted in emotion, convenience, personal preference, or societal trends. True love rejoices in the truth and seeks to correct and evangelize others in a spirit of humility. False love ignores, enables, or normalizes sin, to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, experiencing personal rejection, or as a form of self-preservation. True love seeks the overall well-being of the other person, especially their spiritual welfare. False love desires one’s own welfare through what one can get out of the relationship. True love honors God’s order and seeks to protect others from harm. False love does not see things clearly and enables destructive patterns and behaviors to develop and grow.

In the song “Best of Both Worlds,” the band Van Halen sings: “I want the best of both worlds and I know what it’s worth. If we could have the best of both worlds. we’d have heaven right here on earth.” By embracing the Christian rallying cry of the Great Commandment, to love God and neighbor, we have the best of both worlds, because we begin to experience heaven right here on earth, since love is both human and divine, earthly and eternal. All because God is love, and His love fills the heavens and the earth.

#MaryQueenOfPeace 📞Please call the Church Office at (318) 752-5971 for more information. ... See MoreSee Less