That is a fair question. I would not identify it with praying and reading Scripture, or even having affection for God (though I think loving God is significantly harder in times where there is no emotional affection for Him). If that is the sense in which OP means it,in which if we have to choose between a stranger asking for help or going to a Bible study, then I rescind my objection.
But in insisting "we should love God first," I guess I am expressing two things. First, we should seek to do what is pleasing to God over what is pleasing to our neighbor. Loving our neighbor is part of what it means to prioritize God's will over everything else; feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the imprisoned, visiting the lonely, consoling the sorrowful, pursuing justice; all of these acts of loving neighbor are also acts of loving God. There is no dichotomy here. And, hopefully, the fact that we can acknowledge that we are imitating and serving the highest Reality when performing these acts will help sustain our efforts in doing them if and when the warm fuzzies for our neighbor fizzle away. And when the desires of our neighbors do come into conflict with the virtues we're building (which, fundamentally, are meant to be the ways in which we are sent out into the world to love neighbor in the first place), we should prioritize fidelity to those virtues and our convictions over the good will of our neighbor.
The second thing is a little more complicated. But... friends and family, while really important and probably necessary presences in our lives, cannot be our highest good. It is unfair to make them the source of your ultimate meaning and happiness. This is something that they simply will not be able to do, and it will lead to disillusionment, resentment, and anger. We find our fulfillment in conforming to and entering into communion with the center and terminus of our very being, which is God. We need to recognize Reality for what it (or, rather, who He) is, and learn to fall in love with that. I don't want to get too autobiographical here, but I grew up in a Christian home where the explicit order of prioritization was family, God, then friends. And when things got hard, and duty to loved ones was not enough to sustain me, things got really ugly. When obedience to God was what snapped me out of a really ugly spiral, I felt I betrayed my highest values—not realizing that the very conceptualization of that hierarchy of values was itself disordered, and so doomed to fail me at some point.
As I said, I think this is a hard, and at least initially repugnant-sounding, teaching. And I think most people fail up to it most of the time; but, as Nicholas Lash says when he talks about Christianity (but I think it can also extend to other ethical monotheisms), it "is supposed to be a kind of school, the purpose of whose pedagogy is to fostor the conditions in which . . . the comprehensive taming of chaos by loving order, of conflict by tranquility, of discord by harmony, might be instantiated and proclaimed."
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
annaxmalina
titsay
