Matthew 22:34-40:

Jesus said, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second resembles it: You must love your neighbour as yourself. 

Why is the command to love God the first command? It isn't because he needs anything from us. Why should adults secure their own oxygen masks in an airplane emergency before helping others? Because if we're not alright, we're no good to others. To love God above anything with everything we've got is to get our ideals right, to set a real foundation for what our life will be about. First off, what is truth? Next, what does it truly mean to love? Knowing God will teach us that because God is Truth and God is Love. Truth is reasonable, so it is not whimsical, and can be grasped with or reason. Truth can be objectively known, and is not subject to contradictory opinion. Truth can be tested, and is a necessary foundation for everything else that follows. And Love.. Love is a verb. It does not rely on arbitrarily changing moods and emotions. It is to will the good of someone else, and act accordingly. It is not self-seeking, for if everyone loves like that, then we are reduced to beasts.

Let's get back to basics. If we don't build our lives on God, anything we build will come to absolutely nothing.

He who perseveres to the end will be saved

From a sermon by Saint Augustine

Whenever we suffer some distress or tribulation, there we find warning and correction for ourselves. Our holy scriptures themselves do not promise us peace, security and repose, but tribulations and distress; the gospel is not silent about scandals; but he who perseveres to the end will be saved. What good has this life of ours ever been, from the time of the first man, from when he deserved death and received the curse, that curse from which Christ our Lord delivered us? So we must not complain, brothers, as some of them complained, as the apostle says, and perished from the serpents. What fresh sort of suffering, brothers, does the human race now endure that our fathers did not undergo? Or when do we endure the kind of sufferings which we know they endured? Yet you find men complaining about the times they live in, saying that the times of our parents were good. What if they could be taken back to the times of their parents, and should then complain? The past times that you think were good, are good because they are not yours here and now.

(From Universalis.com, Office of Readings today, 23rd August, 2017)

I get the feeling, what with the question before the Australian public about marriage and assisted suicide, as well as the coinciding charges against Cardinal George Pell, that we are hemmed in with but one question: Convenience or fidelity? Are we with the times or with Christ? Modernity or orthodoxy?

Lest we be mistaken again, it was complacency and inaction that got us here. When we stopped flapping our wings, we started falling. When we stopped advancing, comfortable where we were, well that's just an invitation to relinquish our past triumphs.

And so here we are.

Just my two cents worth.