What begins the Shema is a call to total faith. We are called to entrust our entire lives to God alone. Our faith should be characterized by a single-minded and single-hearted belief in God alone. There should not be many gods and many concerns to be considered in our lives but only one God alone that we serve. In our modern lives we have all become multi-taskers and we juggle many different demands that are placed on our time and our efforts. Often these other competing demands cause us to push aside our relationship with God and the practice of our faith. People are constantly reminding us that there are many different things to be considered in every issue of our day. We are instructed to make lists and to prioritize things in our lives. Usually we choose to attend to the most immediate needs that we see confronting us and seldom is God in an immediate relationship with us and so he is too often relegated to a distant place on our list and sometimes forgotten altogether. Jesus instructs us to replace the “many” with the “One”. The love of God should be our one true concern and we should address the demands of God’s love before all other things that we do in our lives. Rather than being “multipurpose” we are called to be of a “single purpose” and everything else should flow out of our love of God. The Jesuits express this principle in their motto, “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam”, to the greater glory of God. Everything we do should be done for God’s glory – our marriages are lived to glorify God, our parenting should glorify God, our daily work should glorify God and even our leisure activities should glorify God.
The characteristic of the Shema that strikes us is the repeated use of the word, “all”. There is a unity in God and there should be a unity that characterizes our response to God in our relationship with him. True love of God calls for us to offer our entire life to him. God merits more than a half-hearted effort from us. Too often because of the many demands that are placed on us in our lives we end up giving God the left-overs of our life. We pray, worship and serve God when we have available time in our lives to do so which is not very often in our world today. Jesus calls us to make a total sacrificial oblation of love to God. We are to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength.
The life of faith demands a total effort and complete integrity. We must be “all in” in the relationship we have with God and in the relationship we form with our neighbor. Once we are established in our relationship with God then we can turn to our neighbor and respond to the call to love in relationship with others. In our total and complete love for God we discover our true self and now we are prepared for a just relationship with others, “to love your neighbor as yourself.” Love is not only received but it is also given in response to the love that we have experienced in God. When we have given God this response with our lives then we “are not far from the Kingdom of God.” To live our faith with complete integrity draws us out of the world of the many and the changing and into the Kingdom of God which is one and eternal. AMDG, all for the glory of God!