Today we celebrate the feast of a "favored son of the Jesuit Order" – Aloysius Gonzaga. He was born of the princely family of Castiglione in 1568, near Mantua in Lombardy. He was instructed in the faith by his pious mother, and early on manifested an inclination to religious life. After delivering his share of the ancestral dominion to his brother he entered the Society of Jesus. He sought perfection by way of austere penances. While serving the sick during the plague, he himself contracted the disease and died in 1591 at the age of 23.
The things that Aloysius did were done because of his belief in the reality and dynamics of the love of God: especially as it expressed in the new law of loving that Jesus demonstrated and then commanded us to do! If you want to truly experience my presence and the presence of my father, if you truly want to know what being a human being among other human beings is all about – then LOVE ONE ANOTHER, as I have loved you.
This same thing Jesus proclaims in his answer to the scholar of the Jewish Law who was testing him: he tells him that the greatest commandment is to love God first, with all you've got; then to love others as you love yourself to prove that love! Everything is based on this, Jesus assures us!
Aloysius loved God by loving others, especially the sick! We are called to love God by loving others as well – all those who need God's comfort and care and assurance. If we do this in a particularly single-minded way we can even develop our own experience of perfection to a greater degree than what might be ordinary, and we will know a greater fullness of joy in God's presence and delights at his right hand!
I give you a new commandment: love one another as I have loved you!
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