A story is told of four men who were carrying a large board, although it was not so big. It was a slate that could actually be carried by two people; there was no need for four. Yet, four were carrying it, and not only that, all four were tired as if it were very heavy.
Besides being tired, these four were talking among themselves—or rather, complaining among themselves: “I am carrying more weight than all of you,” “You’re only holding it with your fingertips and not putting in any effort,” etc. Everyone complained about everyone else, to the point that the task of carrying this slate—which could have been carried by two—was becoming difficult and unrewarding for them. The reason for this is that none of them wanted to make the effort to carry it properly; each tried to carry it with as little effort as possible, and so they all ended up tired and burdened by a task that should not have tired them at all.
Many times, we Christians experience the same thing with the slate on which the commandments are written: by not carrying them as they should be carried, they end up becoming an unbearable burden in our lives. How should we not keep the commandments? As an obligation. How, then, should we keep the commandments? With love.
Whenever Christ was asked about the commandments, He answered with the commandment of love, which encompasses all the others because it contains the spirit in which they must be lived. It contains the strength that makes it possible for us to fulfill them: love of God, love of neighbor, and ultimately love of ourselves. If we truly love ourselves, we should want to do good to ourselves, and to do good to ourselves we must live according to the commandments, since every time we break a commandment, we harm ourselves.
Hence, the more perfectly I keep the commandments—which means the greater the love with which I keep them—the greater the good I do to myself. Since the commandments, and particularly the commandment of love of God, have no limit regarding the perfection with which they can be kept—because we can always love God more, we can always keep them more perfectly—for this reason we must always strive to follow them better each day.
This means, as Saint Thomas says, not only “placing all one’s affection habitually in God”—which means doing nothing that goes against the love of God—but also, and this is what the saints did, putting “all one’s effort into dedicating oneself to God and divine things, forgetting everything else, as far as the needs of the present life allow” (S.Th., II-II, 24, 8). This forgetting everything else means forgetting all one’s own desires in order to occupy oneself only with the desires of God.
