April 2, 2007
Fr. Joe McCloskey, S.J.

Piety

Piety is the description of how we relate to God. God has first loved us. John 3, 16 is the classic description of how God relates to us by his love. “God loved the world so much that he gave his only son so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life.” Our love of Christ and how we assimilate our lives to his life is the stuff of piety. Piety consists in the strength of our relationship to Christ. The life of Grace is the life of Christ in us. Our uniting with the humanness of Christ gives us our piety. We focus the life of Christ within us by our prayer. The more I see of Christ, the more I find of his life within me.

God is love! His love is absolutely without limit on his part in how he loves us. The problem of love is that it must be free. We cannot force love. It is not owed; it is a free gift. Therein is the rub. We are free to accept love and free to give it. God does not force it out of us. His love is everlasting. Our freedom flows out of his love. We respond to his love by our relationship to Christ who is one of us. It is a conscious relationship since by grace we are sons and daughters of the Father, brothers and sisters of Christ, and living temples of the Holy Spirit.

Freedom births responsibility. All the questions of how God can permit this disaster or another have to do with the misuse of our freedom. How we respond to the scandal of the cross reveals the ultimate Christ dimensions of our love. Piety is seen as a growing relationship with God in how we relate to Christ. And piety is the response to God’s love in us. It is a daily answer to the question of whether or not I am really willing to be who Christ would have been if he had been lucky enough to be me. Because it is an alive relationship, it grows daily. It flows out of our free decisions. Piety is the expression of the response to God’s love in us. It is the gift back to God of our freedom. It is best discovered in the expression of our love for one another.

“How can you love the God you do not see, if you do not love the neighbor you do see?”(1 John 4:19-21) Thus it becomes a shared relationship. My life in Christ is a life that I share with others. Group Reunion expresses the flesh and blood of this relationship by the Piety, Study and Action shared with the special friends of our life of piety. Prayer, Mass, Eucharist and our good works feed us and challenge us to a perfection found in being a real Christ for each other. Every human contact becomes a possible Group Reunion as we bring Christ into the lives of each other. Our whole life and all our human contacts are thus directed to God. We become Contemplatives in Action because life has become our prayer. Piety is the fullness of our lives discovered in Christ. Our lives lived and shared for Christ’s sake make us into Christ for each other. Piety is our Christ life!

Ps. 116 asks the important question, “What return shall I make to the Lord for all that he has given to me?” Piety is the answer. We take up the chalice of salvation by the love we share with each other.
Joel 2:12-13 says it for us. Joel tells us what we must do. “Return to me with your whole heart. With fasting and weeping and mourning; rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the Lord, your God. For gracious and merciful is he, slow to anger, rich in kindness, and relenting in punishment.”
St. Peter Chrysologus said it thus: “Do not lose by sowing, but gather in by scattering.” We must share Christ to hold onto him.

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