Getting Our Priorities Straight

One

How do we order our moral priorities?

In a way, the Christian moral life seems to be enormously complicated. There are so many things our faith expects us to do and so many things it tells us not to do.

Is there any way we can organize our lives around a certain scheme, where we focus on the most important things, but also make sure we get around to addressing even the things of lesser importance? In other words, can we make a strategy, or even just a checklist, where we put the most important things at the top and then we try to work our way down to make sure we don’t miss anything?

Actually, we do have a checklist like that. God gave it to Moses and the Chosen People at Mount Sinai, and Christ reaffirmed it when the Rich Young Man asked him what he had to do to make it into heaven.

It’s called the Ten Commandments. 

Two

The Order of the Decalogue

The commandments are given in a specific order so as to help us prioritize what is most important in life, to see the priority of good things we must pursue and protect, and in what order.

First, we must recognize that God is God, and then act like it. We have to speak of Him reverently, worship Him faithfully, and recognize He is the ultimate source of our happiness. That’s the first three commandments.

The next most important thing in our life is our family. That is why the fourth commandment entails giving what we owe to family members. 

After that, it’s life issues. It’s “don’t kill.” 

Then it’s sexuality, preserving the sacredness and the love between husband and wife.

After that, you have to worry about property stuff. You can’t steal. 

Then you have to develop a habit of careful honesty and order in your speech. 

Then, lastly, you have to really work not just at doing what’s right, but even fighting the temptations to do what’s wrong. That’s the ninth and tenth commandments.

There. That’s your list. Start at the top and work your way down. 

Three

Single-issue voting vs. priority-issue voting

People sometimes accuse faithful believers of being single-issue voters. But we aren’t. We know there are a lot of issues that face a nation. 

But we also know how to prioritize the issues.

We know that God comes first, that if we become an atheistic nation, we’ll have no chance of preserving a just society.

Then we focus on building up the family, and safeguarding life, and resisting the onslaught of public sexual perversion. 

After that comes stuff about property and money, and whatever is subhuman.

Towards the end of the checklist comes an economically fair and just system. That’s also where we have to remember to protect and cultivate the environment in its God-given beauty and bounty.

None of these issues can be ignored. They all matter. But they don’t matter equally. And people who recognize the importance of prioritizing shouldn’t be slandered by being called “single-issue.”

Four

Family – connecting love of God to love of neighbor

Now the fourth commandment shows that right after our obligations to God come our obligations to family, and, initially at least, our parents.

Here’s what the Catechism says about the command to “honor your father and mother.”

“The fourth commandment opens the second table of the Decalogue. It shows us the order of charity. God has willed that, after him, we should honor our parents to whom we owe life and who have handed on to us the knowledge of God.” (#2197)

In other words, the way the Ten Commandments are ordered, it’s the family that is the hinge, the bridge between love of God and love of our neighbor. And that’s not surprising, since it’s in your family where you’re supposed to learn both of those loves, how to Love God and how to love the people He has put in your life.

Five

Love of family as the measure of your love for humanity

G. K. Chesterton points out that only in your family can your capacity to love anyone really be tested.

In other situations, we get to choose. We can sometimes choose where we work, and with whom. We can choose our friends and with whom we want to spend time socially. But you don’t choose your parents or your siblings or your aunts or uncles or children.

So, Chesterton says, the best way to learn how to love humanity generally, would be to pick a random house, jump down the chimney, and just try to get along as well as you could with whomever you found there.

And, he says, that’s pretty much the situation God put all of us into when we were born into a family. So it makes sense that the supreme training and the supreme test of your love for your fellow men and women is how well you love your family.

And that’s why the commandment that comes right after the ones about God have to do with the family relationship.

So how well are you loving your family? And how could you do it better?