Love God and Neighbor: Homily for the Solemnity of Saint Martin de Porres: November 3, 2024

Today I was at Saint Peter Parish in Memphis, Tennessee which is also home to the national shrine of Saint Martin de Porres. The readings are taken from the propers of the Dominican order. Listen to our other podcasts.

Love God and Neighbor

My name is Father DePorres, Father DePorres Durham. My parents were not so zealous that they gave me that baptismal name. I chose that name when I became a Dominican. When I was a little kid, I was fascinated by Saint Martin DePorres.

Probably most of all, because at least what I remember as a little kid was that he could talk to animals. And in that sense, it made him kind of like Dr. Doolittle, and I thought that was very cool. I used to hope that I could talk to animals, but lo and behold, it never happened.

As I got older, though, I began to realize the depth of the example of Saint Martin DePorres to each one of us. How really the readings today help us to understand the actual deep meaning of his life by understanding the two great commandments.

When I was principal of an elementary school, we had two rules, just two. Now, we had the handbook and all that stuff for the legal things, but we had just two rules. Respect the property and respect each other.

And if you think about it, every rule you could have in a school is one of those two things. As a matter of fact, so ingrained was it in the students in this elementary school that if they came, you simply had to say, “Are you here for rule number one or rule number two?” And they knew.

Now, that being said, as I studied the life of Saint Martin DePorres, and as I reflect on the readings that we have today, I learn a great deal about the value and the attraction of people who take these two commandments seriously.

The first reading reminds us that if we’re going to come to celebrate the Eucharist, then there are things that are required of us. And there’s a very impressive list of things that we should do, and an equally impressive list of things we should not.

When I think of Saint Martin DePorres, I think of the fact that as a little child especially, his life was not easy. Abandoned by his father, poor when that happened, and quite difficult. But at the core, his reaction to this hardship and difficulty was love. So much so that when his mother used to give him money to buy food for her and his sister and himself, he never made it to the market with the money because he was so moved by the poor he’d meet along the way.

He did the things that were encouraged to do. In fact, I think it’s so accurate and strong to say that if we’re not willing to do those things, then indeed we really don’t worship God in the truest sense.

But it begins, for Martin, with what we hear in the second reading. You know, during the Revolutionary War, around that time, the prevailing belief in this country was something known as deism, which essentially meant that God created the world like a mechanic and then didn’t really care much about us at all. That is not what we believe about our God.

As a matter of fact, St. Paul tells us that our relationship with God is intimate. Our relationship with God is meant to be loving and kind. We are meant to recognize that we were made for God. That is to say, because we were made for love, and God is love.

But what does that mean? I heard at a Focus conference a couple of years ago, Sister Miriam James, who spoke very beautifully about our relationship with God, but she said something that I’ve used over the past year at various times that has really stuck with me, and hopefully you’ll find it helpful, too. She said this, “It is good that you exist.” Hear that again. “It is good that you exist.”

How often in our lives are we troubled by the fact that we don’t really live up to our own standards, or we don’t feel we measure up, or we don’t think that people think very highly of us?

But our God does all of those things. He helps us to recognize that with His grace we can measure up. He helps us to recognize that we were not made accidentally because God had some leftover materials. We were created with deep intention for love.

And so when life is hard or life is difficult, try to remember that phrase, “It is good that you exist.” Saint Martin de Porres remembered that phrase, and everything he did came out of this intimate and close relationship with God.

Secondly, we hear in the Gospel this great and wonderful parable of the Good Samaritan. And we are called to recognize that in what we do, we must love our neighbor. And Jesus makes it clear we don’t get to pick and choose which people are our neighbor. In fact, everyone is our neighbor. We are called to love God and to live that love of God by the way in which we love one another.

How powerful are those two commandments, and how desperately do we need to remember those two commandments today? We live in a world that is not very pretty these days. There’s war and violence, oftentimes impacting most the most desperate members of society. We have people that don’t have enough to eat. There are wars raging all over the planet. Even in our own country, we oftentimes divide people into those we like and those we don’t. We don’t speak well of one another.

Probably nowhere do we recognize that more than the challenge of our present time as we’re on the verge of an election. But Saint Martin de Porres reminds us that when we take these two commandments seriously, we provide an example that is attractive.

Saint Martin de Porres was adored in his life. In fact, it was said that he needed to be closed in three habits when he was waked, because people were tearing pieces of his habit off of his body, because they wanted to be close to this man who was known as Martin the Charitable. He touched their hearts and their lives.

Fortunately for me, Pope Francis wrote an encyclical on this very parable called Fratelli Tutti. And really, it reminds us of the great power that you and I have when we turn ourselves over to God, when we recognize that all depends on his grace. He says this. These are paragraphs 68, and then I’ll read the next paragraph, 69. He says this.

“The parable clearly does not indulge in abstract moralizing, nor is its message merely social and ethical. It speaks to all of us an essential and often forgotten aspect of our common humanity. We were created for a fulfillment that can only be found in love. We cannot be indifferent to suffering. We cannot allow anyone to go through life as an outcast. Instead, we should feel indignant, challenged to emerge from our comfortable isolation and be changed by our contact with human suffering. This is the meaning of human dignity.”

Now, it’s always a discernment process to know what we should do when we encounter someone on the margins of society. But ignoring them is not one of discernment. It can be easy to look the other way in the face of suffering. It can be easy, if our lives are good, to blame those who suffer for their suffering.

But the Samaritan recognized that more important was to recognize the human dignity that this man on the road had. Francis goes on.

“The parable is clear and straightforward, yet it invokes the interior struggle that each of us experiences as we gradually come to know ourselves through our relationships with our brothers and sisters. Sooner or later, we will be able to recognize that we are all suffering. Sooner or later, we will all encounter a person who is suffering. Today, there are more and more of them. The decision to include or exclude those lying wounded along the roadside can serve as a criterion for judging every economic, political, social, and religious situation. Each day, we have to decide whether to be good Samaritans or indifferent bystanders. And if we extend our gaze to the history of our own lives and that of the entire world, all of us are or have been like each of the characters in the parable. All of us have in ourselves something of the wounded man, something of the robber, something of the passersby, and something of the good Samaritan.”

Jesus challenges us today to decide who it is we are going to be. Will we turn ourselves over to the love of God and be inspired to serve our neighbor? For if we do, we, like Saint Martin de Porres, will be an attractive example of faith, living with Jesus forever in eternal life.

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