Breaking Up Tiles

Evidently, knowledge of the content of faith is essential for giving one’s own assent, that is to say for adhering fully with intellect and will to what the Church proposes. Knowledge of faith opens a door into the fullness of the saving mystery revealed by God. The giving of assent implies that, when we believe, we freely accept the whole mystery of faith, because the guarantor of its truth is God who reveals himself and allows us to know his mystery of love.

On the other hand, we must not forget that in our cultural context, very many people, while not claiming to have the gift of faith, are nevertheless sincerely searching for the ultimate meaning and definitive truth of their lives and of the world. This search is an authentic “preamble” to the faith, because it guides people onto the path that leads to the mystery of God. Human reason, in fact, bears within itself a demand for “what is perennially valid and lasting”. This demand constitutes a permanent summons, indelibly written into the human heart, to set out to find the One whom we would not be seeking had he not already set out to meet us. To this encounter, faith invites us and it opens us in fullness.

Porta Fidei 10

Reflection – This passage is among the most beautiful in this apostolic letter. The Pope first links the whole business of the content of the faith—the creed, the dogmas, the Scriputures—to the underlying deeper dynamic of faith. We hand over our lives, accept the Lordship of Christ and the gift of God’s life for us, in a way that is essentially and inextricably united with the assent of the intellect to revealed truth.

In our post-modern world there is a great movement, a sort of centrifugal force towards the separation of things, the fragmenting of reality. Everything is broken up into little bits and we all go foraging to pick up the little bits that suit us. It’s like mosaic work, where ceramic tiles are broken up into tiny pieces that the artist assembles into the picture he or she desires. All of reality is broken up tile, and every one of us is making up our own picture from the fragments.

This fragmented approach to life is simply not the Catholic vision. Our whole Catholic tradition is that reality is a whole, an integrated piece, a seamless garment. Not a mosaic made up of fragments, but an icon written by a sure strong hand. Do not forget that the very word Catholic is from the Greek kata holos—roughly, ‘corresponding to the whole’. Universal, all-encompassing, complete, in other words.

So we cannot, must not, make blanket statements of separation and fragmentation. Well, I believe in Jesus, but the Church I’m not so sure of… well, I like the Gospels, but all these dogmas drive me crazy… well, I like the New Testament, but the Old is so harsh… well, I like the theology of the first millennium, but things went a little crazy after that…

Breaking up the tiles! Making a mosaic! Creating a little picture of Catholicism that corresponds, not to the whole of it, but to the little bits that I like. Essentially, making Catholicism over again in my image, according to my likeness.

We have to be very careful about that, as it is the spirit of the age, and all of us are subject to it to some degree. We do live in a broken, fragmented world, but our Catholic faith is that God has communicated to us the unbroken image, a restored vision of reality and truth that comes to us through the ministry of the Church, itself made up of broken flawed individuals.

Of course, in this it is so beautiful and compassionate that the Pope offers such deep respect and concern for the many people who search and struggle and cannot find their way to the Catholic faith but who nonetheless earnestly desire the truth. This is a holy struggle and a blessed search, and the whole pastoral energy of the Church—of all of us—must be towards putting forth the Catholic vision of life with greater and deeper clarity so that all these good, hungry people might find their way to it more easily.

 

And so this one paragraph, Porta Fidei 10, which I’ve blogged on these last days is a truly marvellous thing—a whole vision of faith in the heart which is expressed on the lips and yields an all-embracing integrated vision of reality. There is enough in this one paragraph to give us food for thought, prayer, and action for this year of faith.

Leaving the Cupboard

Confessing with the lips indicates in turn that faith implies public testimony and commitment. A Christian may never think of belief as a private act. Faith is choosing to stand with the Lord so as to live with him. This “standing with him” points towards an understanding of the reasons for believing. Faith, precisely because it is a free act, also demands social responsibility for what one believes. The Church on the day of Pentecost demonstrates with utter clarity this public dimension of believing and proclaiming one’s faith fearlessly to every person. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit that makes us fit for mission and strengthens our witness, making it frank and courageous.

Profession of faith is an act both personal and communitarian. It is the Church that is the primary subject of faith. In the faith of the Christian community, each individual receives baptism, an effective sign of entry into the people of believers in order to obtain salvation. As we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “ ‘I believe’ is the faith of the Church professed personally by each believer, principally during baptism. ‘We believe’ is the faith of the Church confessed by the bishops assembled in council or more generally by the liturgical assembly of believers. ‘I believe’ is also the Church, our mother, responding to God by faith as she teaches us to say both ‘I believe’ and ‘we believe’.”

Porta Fidei 10

Reflection  - There is much to muse on in this passage, much food for thought. There are always two extremes which distort the nature of faith. There is the social/communitarian model of faith, whereby faith is just ‘what everyone does.’ We’re all Catholics, so let’s all go to Mass now—that kind of thing. While this was more common reality in previous eras, people who grow up in strong religious families can still fall into this extreme. We’re Catholics, Catholics have certain rules that they live by, and here’s what they are, so shape up, buddy!

Of course what is missing here is any sense of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, with God as Father, with the Holy Spirit as a real active presence. But then this personal model of faith can also become distorted. Me and Jesus and that’s all there is to it, a wholly individualistic and private matter of the heart. Very little if any sense of a community, a responsibility to be part of a group, a body, a society with moral obligations. Just… me and Jesus! All very cozy, but not really right.

Because Jesus didn’t live that way, you know. And ‘faith is choosing to stand with the Lord so as to live with Him.’ Jesus’ own relationship with the Father clearly had and has a personal intimacy and a directness that beggars our imagination – we’re talking about the relations of the Trinity here, about which we know precisely nothing! But the way Jesus lived out this intimate unity with His Father plunged Him fully into the life of the community, of the society of his time and people.

His engagements with the Pharisees, His teachings about the law and its application, His own practice of the Jewish liturgical life, His profound development for his disciples of the moral demands, the social principles, the all-encompassing implications of his Gospel—all of this makes nonsense of any kind of individualistic ‘me and Jesus’ faith.

Catherine Doherty used to tell a favourite story of her patron saint Catherine of Siena. St. Catherine began her life with God living a solitary life of prayer and penance in a cupboard under the stairs of her family home. This went well for quite a while, and she had mystical graces and all that good stuff. But one day Jesus said to her, “Now I want you to go out and serve my people.” She objected that she wanted to stay there and just be with Him. He said, “Well, you can stay in the cupboard, but I won’t be here!” And St. Catherine promptly went running out of the cupboard and dedicated the rest of her life to passionate, heroic service of the sick, the poor, and the troubled Church of her day.

Jesus calls all of us—even those genuinely called to be solitary hermits—out of the cupboard. Faith begins in ‘the cupboard’—that beautiful intimacy with Christ in the depths of our hearts—but once Christ is there, the cupboard door flies open, and we are called to live and love and serve and ultimately die for the world. Because that’s what Jesus did, and faith is all about standing with Him and living His life.

The Place of Yes and No

At this point I would like to sketch a path intended to help us understand more profoundly not only the content of the faith, but also the act by which we choose to entrust ourselves fully to God, in complete freedom. In fact, there exists a profound unity between the act by which we believe and the content to which we give our assent. Saint Paul helps us to enter into this reality when he writes: “Man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved” (Rom 10:10). The heart indicates that the first act by which one comes to faith is God’s gift and the action of grace which acts and transforms the person deep within.

The example of Lydia is particularly eloquent in this regard. Saint Luke recounts that, while he was at Philippi, Paul went on the Sabbath to proclaim the Gospel to some women; among them was Lydia and “the Lord opened her heart to give heed to what was said by Paul” (Acts 16:14). There is an important meaning contained within this expression. Saint Luke teaches that knowing the content to be believed is not sufficient unless the heart, the authentic sacred space within the person, is opened by grace that allows the eyes to see below the surface and to understand that what has been proclaimed is the word of God.

Porta Fidei 10

Reflection – OK, time for another little series on the blog. One unfortunate result of the last two weeks when missions and operations (which all sounds very military and special forces…) have reduced my blogging capacity severely is that I more or less have missed this whole first couple of weeks of the Year of Faith. So let’s spend a few days on our ongoing journey through Porta Fidei, why don’t we?

Pope Benedict in this key passage from paragraph 10 of the letter alludes to an old and key distinction in the term ‘faith’. In technical language, there is the fides quae, which is the actual doctrines, creeds, propositions that make up our Catholic faith: God is three persons in the one divine nature; Christ is true God and true man; the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ. But then there is the fides qua, the very act of believing, what we are doing when we give our assent to these truths, and what it means for our lives.

As the Pope points out so rightly, though, these two ‘faiths’ are intimately united. It is part of our content of faith, the ‘quae’, that faith is a response to grace, a gift of God in its first movement to which our freedom gives its assent. God is the initiator, the first mover in our life of faith, and this is so crucial.

The Lord opened Lydia’s heart to receive the words Paul preached. This is the first movement and the most essential in the life of faith. And yet what a mystery this is! Don’t you find it so? Why do I have faith (presuming, Lord have mercy on me, that I do!) while others who seem just as good if not much better than me do not? What is this strange gift of God that in our Christian understanding is necessary for salvation, and yet seems to be given to some and not to others.

And yet… God must offer this gift to everyone, surely? It really is very mysterious, and I suppose ultimately we are not going to understand God’s ways on this matter until we are on the other side. As Aslan said to Lucy in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, no one is ever told any story except his own. I know that God has come to me and opened my heart to accept the Gospel as His own truth; I know He did this because He loves me very much indeed; I have to assume this same love and mercy are at work in every human heart, and that the fullness of time will show this to be the case.

It’s this whole business of the heart, that secret silent sanctuary buried deep in each human person. That’s where the action is going on, the strange mysterious encounter of each man and woman with God, the place of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, a dialogue no other human being is privy to and a wrestling match that occurs strictly under cover of darkness and alone (cf. Gen 32).

 

That is where faith starts, but it’s not where faith ends. And that’s what the Pope will go on to discuss… tomorrow. See you then.

Profess, Witness, Celebrate

We want this Year to arouse in every believer the aspiration to profess the faith in fullness and with renewed conviction, with confidence and hope. It will also be a good opportunity to intensify the celebration of the faith in the liturgy, especially in the Eucharist, which is “the summit towards which the activity of the Church is directed; ... and also the source from which all its power flows” (Lumen Gentium). At the same time, we make it our prayer that believers’ witness of life may grow in credibility.

To rediscover the content of the faith that is professed, celebrated, lived and prayed, and to reflect on the act of faith, is a task that every believer must make his own, especially in the course of this Year.

Not without reason, Christians in the early centuries were required to learn the creed from memory. It served them as a daily prayer not to forget the commitment they had undertaken in baptism. With words rich in meaning, Saint Augustine speaks of this in a homily on the redditio symboli, the handing over of the creed: “the symbol of the holy mystery that you have all received together and that today you have recited one by one, are the words on which the faith of Mother Church is firmly built above the stable foundation that is Christ the Lord. You have received it and recited it, but in your minds and hearts you must keep it ever present, you must repeat it in your beds, recall it in the public squares and not forget it during meals: even when your body is asleep, you must watch over it with your hearts.”

Porta Fidei 9

Reflection -  Well, here we have a nice little summary of what the year of faith is meant to achieve. Through this year, however we choose to enter into it and move through it, we are to profess the faith with greater conviction, celebrate the faith with greater intensity, especially in the Eucharist, and witness to the faith with integrity—live it out.

Profess, celebrate, witness—these are the three actions we do with faith. The Pope will go on shortly to explore how professing the faith implies knowing it, and so the importance of study, catechesis, taking the responsibility for educating ourselves in our Catholic faith.

In this passage, though, he starts with the Creed, that most fundamental basic proclamation of faith. Probably most of us do in fact know the Creed by heart, since we pray it in Church every Sunday. I wonder how much time we spend reflecting on it, though. Sometimes we can rattle it off like a list of dogmas we check off: ‘I believe in God… check! The Father almighty… check! Maker of heaven and earth… check!’

That’s not what it is, fundamentally, although we do certainly believe all these things to be true. But these statements call us into a relationship that should change our lives, a relationship that has profound implications for how we think, what we do, how we treat others.

If I believe in God the Father almighty, I have to act as his beloved son. If God is really God and Father, then the world is not a cold wilderness in which I have to scrabble, claw, and fight for survival. If God is maker of heaven and earth, all things visible and invisible, then I have to treat every created person and thing with reverence and great care. If I believe all that we say about Jesus in the Creed, then He is the most important person in my life, and everything else revolves around him, my Lord and Savior.

 

And so on it goes, through the Creed. To believe in the Church means it’s not just an optional part of being a Christian. To believe in forgiveness of sins means rejecting shame and guilt and turning to God with simple humility and repentance at all times. Every line of the Creed informs a whole way of life; we profess it, and out of this profession comes witness, and witness terminates—consummates—in celebration, as the faith we profess and strive to live is a beautiful, joyful thing.

Time to Leave the Half-Way House

The renewal of the Church is also achieved through the witness offered by the lives of believers: by their very existence in the world, Christians are called to radiate the word of truth that the Lord Jesus has left us… The Year of Faith, from this perspective, is a summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the one Saviour of the world. In the mystery of his death and resurrection, God has revealed in its fullness the Love that saves and calls us to conversion of life through the forgiveness of sins (cf. Acts 5:31). For Saint Paul, this Love ushers us into a new life: “We were buried ... with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4).

Through faith, this new life shapes the whole of human existence according to the radical new reality of the resurrection. To the extent that he freely cooperates, man’s thoughts and affections, mentality and conduct are slowly purified and transformed, on a journey that is never completely finished in this life. “Faith working through love” (Gal 5:6) becomes a new criterion of understanding and action that changes the whole of man’s life (cf. Rom 12:2; Col 3:9-10; Eph 4:20-29; 2 Cor 5:17).

Porta Fidei 6

Reflection – Well, the Year of Faith is approaching quickly – less than a month away now. What are you going to do about it? What’s happening in your diocese, your parish? Anything? Are you planning to plug into whatever’s going on, maybe even help out with it, or will you leave that for ‘someone else’ to do? It’s amazing to me how often people will ignore the events going on in their local church, but then turn around and complain that the Church does nothing for them…

Or maybe there really is not much going on in your parish or diocese, or you genuinely cannot participate. What are you going to do? The Year of Faith, as Pope Benedict expresses it above, is a call to an authentic and renewed conversion of life, to entering this radical new reality that completely reshapes the whole of human existence, completely purifies and transforms our thoughts, affections, mentality, conduct.

That’s quite an agenda for the year, and for our lives. Any takers? Do we want to have our whole existence reshaped? That’s the question, I think. We can get stuck, you know, in a sort of half-way house, if we’re not careful. Oh, we believe in Jesus… sort of. We believe in God… somewhat. We believe in the Catholic faith… well, let me get back to you about that.

So often we can have formal faith, the ritual assent of our minds to the Creed, say, but our minds and hearts and conduct are filled chock-full with all sorts of things that have no relationship to what we say we believe. This is such a common problem I’m tempted to say it’s universal. Nearly, anyhow.

And we can resist moving against this. We can hold on to the spurious wisdom of the world, to the cheap finery of conformity to the spirit of the age, to the fool’s gold of the false lessons we may have learned from our families and communities of origin. To abandon ourselves to the transformation of the mind and the heart – to truly subject every thought, every desire, every choice to the Spirit of Christ coming to us in faith, which we understand in our Catholic faith to be channelled by the faith, life, and teaching of the Church – this is radical stuff, and we don’t necessarily welcome it.

Well, this is what the Year of Faith is about. Time to examine the ‘truths’ we actually live by, as opposed to the truths we say we believe, and see if anything needs jettisoning. Time to look at our relationship with Christ and see just how vibrant and real it is for us, and do something about it if it has grown cold. Time to examine our conduct and repent of anything we might be doing that is inconsistent with the radical love and hope of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Time to grow in faith—that’s what the year is about. So… what are you going to do about it?

The Question of Vatican II

My venerable predecessor saw this Year as a “consequence and a necessity of the postconciliar period”, fully conscious of the grave difficulties of the time, especially with regard to the profession of the true faith and its correct interpretation… the texts bequeathed by the Council Fathers, in the words of Blessed John Paul II, “have lost nothing of their value or brilliance. They need to be read correctly, to be widely known and taken to heart as important and normative texts of the Magisterium, within the Church's Tradition ... I feel more than ever in duty bound to point to the Council as the great grace bestowed on the Church in the twentieth century: there we find a sure compass by which to take our bearings in the century now beginning.”

I would also like to emphasize strongly what I had occasion to say concerning the Council a few months after my election as Successor of Peter: “if we interpret and implement it guided by a right hermeneutic, it can be and can become increasingly powerful for the ever necessary renewal of the Church.”

Porta Fidei 5

Reflection – Ah, the question of Vatican II! This year of faith begins October 14 on the 50^th Anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. So much ink-and-pixels have been spilt over the meaning, value, prophetic character, problems, misinterpretations, or apocalypticomigodhorror of the Council and its aftermath. I’m not really sure what I have to offer on a subject about which so many have said so much before me.

This in spite of my having been born more or less when the Council was ending and thus having lived my entire life as a Catholic in its shadow.The pre-conciliar church is not a memory for me; it is something I’ve heard of only. In terms of direct lived experience, the church of Vatican II is the only one I’ve known, and so it is difficult for me to assess it. To what shall I compare it?

Growing up when I did, I’ve had a bit of a reaction to the dominant attitude, which tended to present Vatican II as the Greatest Event in Church History™ after the Resurrection (perhaps), besides which the previous 1962 years serve as a dark prologue at best. A steady diet of that through childhood and adolescence, while church attendance plummeted and the remaining average parishioner could no longer name the ten commandments, four evangelists, or three persons of the Trinity, is enough to make Pollyanna a cynic.

Meanwhile, of course, there was the much smaller crowd of people for whom Vatican II was a dark freemasonic plot forged in the bowels of hell to destroy the church from within. The church was doing just fine (fine, I tell you, fine!) until Pope John XXIII bizarrely decided to call a council, and it all went to hell from there…

So having spent much of my life hearing those two positions endlessly reiterated (along with, I grant, several more moderate versions), I like reading what our last two popes have said about Vatican II (btw, sorry to have lost the hyperlinks for the quotes somewhere along the way).

Namely, Vatican II is of great value and import in 20^th century Catholicism, and needs to be interpreted properly and within the continuous line of tradition. The post-conciliar era has brought great problems to the Church in terms of knowledge of the faith, but the actual texts of Vatican II (as opposed to the tricksy and ever-changing ‘Spirit of Vatican II™), carefully read and understood in light of our 2000 years of consistent doctrine, themselves provide insight into how to address these problems.

What a nice balanced attitude. Trust the Popes! Gotta hand it to them! So this is the spirit in which we should look upon Vatican II as we approach this year of faith. It might be a good idea this year to dust off the documents and read them again (surely you have a copy of them in your home, right… right?). You know - what do they actually say, as opposed to what everyone thinks they say?

What did Lumen Gentium actually say about the hierarchical structure of the Church? (Hint: not a democracy). What did Sacrosanctum Consilium actually say about the liturgy? (Hint: almost nothing about the use of the vernacular). What did Nostra Aetate say about other religions? (Hint: we are not relativists). It might be good to read these old documents. Just, you know, to know what the Church actually said in them. Just a thought…

Mark Your Calendars!

I have decided to announce a Year of Faith. It will begin on 11 October 2012, the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, and it will end on the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King, on 24 November 2013. The starting date of 11 October 2012 also marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a text promulgated by my Predecessor, Blessed John Paul II, with a view to illustrating for all the faithful the power and beauty of the faith… Moreover, the theme of the General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops that I have convoked for October 2012 is “The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith”. This will be a good opportunity to usher the whole Church into a time of particular reflection and rediscovery of the faith.

It is not the first time that the Church has been called to celebrate a Year of Faith. My venerable Predecessor the Servant of God Paul VI announced one in 1967, to commemorate the martyrdom of Saints Peter and Paul on the 19^th centenary of their supreme act of witness….  The great upheavals of that year made even more evident the need for a celebration of this kind. It concluded with the Credo of the People of God, intended to show how much the essential content that for centuries has formed the heritage of all believers needs to be confirmed, understood and explored ever anew, so as to bear consistent witness in historical circumstances very different from those of the past.

Porta Fidei 4

Reflection – Mark your calendars! The Year of Faith is coming—what are YOU going to do about it?

These ‘years’ of the Church, of which there have been quite a few over the last decade or so, are interesting creatures. Remember the ‘year of St. Paul’ (2008) or the ‘year of prayer for priests’ (2009?) or the ‘year of the Eucharist’ (2006)? What is the Church doing when it pronounces these years, and what are we supposed to do about them?

Well, the document Porta Fidei which I’m going through paragraph at a time will answer what the Church is doing. It is doing what it always does, or at least tries to do. It is calling us to conversion and to deepening of our commitment to Christ. Whether it is by delving into the apostolic spirit of St. Paul, the gift par excellence of the Eucharist, or praying for us priests to become the saints we’re supposed to be, these years are a vehicle to communally plunge deeper into the mystery of Christ and the faith.

And so it is with this year of faith. In timing it to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council and the 20^th anniversary of the Catechism, it seems to me that Pope Benedict is making a very basic point that needs to be made. Namely, the essential unity and necessary connection between a living, vibrant, apostolic, missionary faith and an adherence to the deposit of faith which takes concrete form in the doctrines of the Church.

Too often in the past 50 years we have disconnected these two or even opposed them. ‘Away with all the formulas, creeds, dogmas, and rules! Vatican II called us to a living relationship with Christ!’ This is a common attitude, especially among Catholics of a certain age (cough-Boomers-cough). (Incidentally I am precisely one year too young to qualify as a Boomer and so can adopt a Gen-X pose of slacker hipsterdom and ironic cool.)

Anyhow, enough inter-generational politics…

The Pope makes the point, by linking Vatican II and the Catechism, that without content, without doctrine, without a concrete binding dogmatic core, the living relationship with Christ becomes a mere abstraction. Christ becomes a projection of our own egos and ids, our own devices and desires. Only when we are bound to the Church’s teaching do we break out of this and enter into a true living relationship with the True Christ.

The Church in its teaching office plays, then, a necessary role in bringing us to Christ. Not the Christ of our imagining, not the Christ of our making, but simply Christ. And She does this, not exclusively, but certainly by her teaching office which is encapsulated in the Catechism. And because we enter through this into a real relationship with the real Christ, we can go forth into the world with apostolic courage and a deep concern for the needs and cares of our time.

Mark your calendars – the Year of Faith is coming! What are YOU going to do about it???

Oh Yeah?

We cannot accept that salt should become tasteless or the light be kept hidden (cf. Mt 5:13-16). The people of today can still experience the need to go to the well, like the Samaritan woman, in order to hear Jesus, who invites us to believe in him and to draw upon the source of living water welling up within him (cf. Jn 4:14). We must rediscover a taste for feeding ourselves on the word of God, faithfully handed down by the Church, and on the bread of life, offered as sustenance for his disciples (cf. Jn 6:51). Indeed, the teaching of Jesus still resounds in our day with the same power: “Do not labour for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life” (Jn 6:27). The question posed by his listeners is the same that we ask today: “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” (Jn 6:28). We know Jesus’ reply: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (Jn 6:29). Belief in Jesus Christ, then, is the way to arrive definitively at salvation.

Porta Fidei 3

Reflection – So we continue our weekly preparation for the Year of Faith beginning this October, marking the 50^th Anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.

Here Pope Benedict holds out for us the enduring possibility of faith today, both as need and as realized fact. I am often struck in contemporary novels and movies at the opposite: the complete non-existence of faith on either level.

Faith, at least according to the producers of mass culture, is either unthinkable or extraneous or, often enough, repellent and dangerous. This is especially marked in the cultural offerings coming from Europe. God and faith in Him just are not viable options, at least not in many significant quarters.

And we know that this is true, not only on the screen and on the page, but in many people’s lives. An aggressive secularism, a relentless and determined excluding of divine claims and divine possibilities too often rules people’s lives.

Some herald this as a positive development, of course: humanity outgrowing its needs for myths and superstitions and invisible friends. Modern man is learning he no longer needs God for meaning, a commenter informed me a few posts back. To which I responded, basically, ‘oh yeah?’ OK, not my best argument ever…

But really, oh yeah? If there is no God, or if God is pushed so far to the margins of our lived reality that there may as well be no God, do we, can we still have meaning in life? Certainly we cannot have meaning in the universe itself. Meaning is a product of mind; if there is no Mind underlying the cosmos, there is no Meaning in the cosmos.

The secularist would say, I suppose, ‘who cares about that?’ I have a mind, and my mind will generate a meaning for my life. Meaning then becomes a tiny bivouac carved out in a vast sea (think of the size of the universe, and its emptiness) of meaninglessness. For example, ‘my life is about my children,’ some would say. Yes, but what is their life about? Well, whatever they want it to be. What if they want it to be something you find repulsive, or they find no menaing in life. Your bivouac just got obliterated, didn’t it?

‘My life is about my work.’ Well, even if you’re one of the lucky few who is working on something like curing cancer, that doesn’t do it, you know. Because if there is no meaning to life in the first place, why does it matter if cancer is cured? If we’re all just matter, then maybe the tumor has as much claim to existence as the person.

‘My life is about the love I put into it.’ Well, this sounds more persuasive. Except… what is love? A warm oogly googly feeling? A choice to treat people in a certain way? Where does it come from and where does it go? What if your love fails, or what if the object of your love fails you, betrays you. What if your love bears no visible fruit? And in a world devoid of deeper meaning, what fruit does love bear, anyhow? We all end up being food for worms – what difference does it make, really, if I love and care for people or hurt and us people?

All the while in all of this, God waits. A Person, a Love, a Truth that holds all our loves and all work, our children and ourselves, receives everything we are and gives everything we are and do being and purpose. I really don’t see how any godless quest for meaning can end in anything but tragic failure, and if someone can explain to me how it does they are welcome to try.

And it doesn’t have to, you know. God is. Meaning is. Truth is. And so our lives do not have to be tragic fruitless marches towards the grave. There is a bread that endures to eternity, and a living water that quenches our thirst. And this is what the Church and the Pope are inviting us to contemplate and proclaim in this upcoming year.

Back To School

Ever since the start of my ministry as Successor of Peter, I have spoken of the need to rediscover the journey of faith so as to shed ever clearer light on the joy and renewed enthusiasm of the encounter with Christ. During the homily at the Mass marking the inauguration of my pontificate I said: “The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance.”

It often happens that Christians are more concerned for the social, cultural and political consequences of their commitment, continuing to think of the faith as a self-evident presupposition for life in society. In reality, not only can this presupposition no longer be taken for granted, but it is often openly denied. Whereas in the past it was possible to recognize a unitary cultural matrix, broadly accepted in its appeal to the content of the faith and the values inspired by it, today this no longer seems to be the case in large swathes of society, because of a profound crisis of faith that has affected many people.

Porta Fidei 2

Reflection – I started blogging my way through this document last week, in  preparation for the Year of Faith announced by the Holy Father to begin this October, marking the 50^th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.

In this 2^nd paragraph we start to see why the Pope has done such a thing. What is this ‘Year of Faith’? Isn’t every year a year of faith? What is he thinking?

Every year is, indeed, meant to be a year of faith… but is it? For how many people has faith become a remote reality. Even for people in the church faith can become pretty tenuous, pretty abstract or shaky. Religion all too often becomes something we do for an hour on Sunday. Our lives are lived… elsewhere.

The Pope is calling us to get back to basics, it seems to me. What is life about? What is the point, the purpose, the goal, the source, the substance of life? Is it Christ and our friendship with him? Or is it something else? That something else needn’t be something wicked and dissolute, like hedonism or power or unbridled pursuit of wealth. It can be normal human goods, like friendship and family, peace and security, inner well being. All things that are good, but are not, if we live for them, a matter of living by faith.

We are made for God, every last one of us. Made for communion with Him, and out of that, to be in communion with our family and friends, to have peace and security and inner well being and a host of other secondary goods. But first things first.

The Pope makes a very good point when he says that the Church has far too often presumed the faith and then focused Her energies on social justice or other things consequent upon faith. I am reminded vividly of a conversation a number of years ago with my niece who had gone through a full twelve years of Catholic schools and told me that nobody, in twelve years, ever actually told them anything the Catholic Church taught, but would refer to it as if they already knew it.

How a school child is supposed to show up in the school system already knowing their catechism is beyond me… but that seems to be a typical experience. And then the parishes assume the children are getting it in the schools, and the parents assume the same, or that the parish is taking care of it… and as a result no one knows nothin’ about nothin’. In Madonna House we see wonderful young adults coming here, men and women full of good will and a hunger and enthusiasm for God… and often they know very little indeed of basic catechetical matters.

Anyhow, that seems to be the situation the Pope is calling for us to address in this year of faith. Don’t presume that anyone knows anything anymore! And get back, in our parishes, our schools, and around our family dinner tables, to the basics. What is life about? Who are you, who is God, who is Jesus? What has God done in our midst, and what does this mean for how we are to live our lives? Find out, or if you already know these basic truths, deepen your knowledge of them, examine your heart as to how you are living by them, and above all, pass them on to others.

It is a matter of urgent importance. The fate of the world rests on the question of faith, our living by faith and our communication of faith to those who lack it.

Getting Beyond Ourselves

The “door of faith” (Acts 14:27) is always open for us, ushering us into the life of communion with God and offering entry into his Church. It is possible to cross that threshold when the word of God is proclaimed and the heart allows itself to be shaped by transforming grace. To enter through that door is to set out on a journey that lasts a lifetime. It begins with baptism (cf. Rom 6:4), through which we can address God as Father, and it ends with the passage through death to eternal life, fruit of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, whose will it was, by the gift of the Holy Spirit, to draw those who believe in him into his own glory (cf. Jn 17:22).

To profess faith in the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is to believe in one God who is Love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8): the Father, who in the fullness of time sent his Son for our salvation; Jesus Christ, who in the mystery of his death and resurrection redeemed the world; the Holy Spirit, who leads the Church across the centuries as we await the Lord’s glorious return.

Porta Fidei 1

Reflection – Yesterday I started a journey through the ‘Door of Faith’, the letter of Pope Benedict announcing the Year of Faith beginning this October in honor of the 50^th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council

This first paragraph is a dense, complex, and very beautiful presentation of the essence of faith, and yesterday I started going through it line by line, so as to draw out its meaning. So let’s continue doing that:

It begins with baptism (cf. Rom 6:4), through which we can address God as Father... – Faith begins with baptism, and baptism makes us children of God. We are so accustomed in our Western European tradition to a predominantly intellectual understanding of faith – faith as intellectual assent to revealed truths – that we can forget there is something deeper going on. A baby makes no intellectual assent, yet baptism ushers this baby through the door of faith. Faith begins with an action of God, and this action of God constitutes us as his children, thus making it possible for us to formulate intellectual assent as our minds grow to that point.

...and it ends with the passage through death to eternal life, fruit of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, whose will it was, by the gift of the Holy Spirit, to draw those who believe in him into his own glory (cf. Jn 17:22). – faith is a journey with a beginning that is beyond us, only possible by the action of God, and with an end that is beyond us, too. I can no more come into eternal life by my own actions and choices than I can fly. The terminus of our life is beyond us, as is its origin. So our whole life is bound up with God and His actions, His initiatives, His choice on our behalf. This is so crucial to understanding everything about life. It’s not about us; it’s not about our ideas and understandings and capacities. We have ideas; we have abilities and disabilities; but God is always pulling us beyond, past these, into a bigger reality. The whole movement of faith, the whole life of grace is a matter of being called beyond ourselves into God’s life. It begins at baptism and ends with this explosion into eternal glory, and is wholly God’s work, to which we respond.

To profess faith in the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is to believe in one God who is Love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8): the Father, who in the fullness of time sent his Son for our salvation; Jesus Christ, who in the mystery of his death and resurrection redeemed the world; the Holy Spirit, who leads the Church across the centuries as we await the Lord’s glorious return. – And the response is faith. To believe is to believe that God loves us, that His love is fully expressed in the person of Jesus Christ, his words and deeds, and that this love is a living present reality in the gift of the Holy Spirit. And to believe this, to believe in the love of God, means entrusting ourselves to this love. To take the Gospel literally and put it into practice. To turn our faces and our hearts towards God continually, knowing that His love is real and our lives are meant to be permeated and transformed by this love.

This is faith – to be so convinced of God’s love for me that I look nowhere else for life, for meaning, for truth, for direction, for what is right and wrong, for fulfillment. God and God alone gives us all these things.

And this is the journey we are all on. It doesn’t matter where you are on this journey – is faith small or big in your life right now. What matters is that you and I are on the journey, and that we keep journeying. And we journey by following after Jesus, tugging on the fringe of his garment and asking him, “Give me more faith today, please! Hey, Lord, I need more faith! Thanks!” That’s what matters.

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

The “door of faith” (Acts 14:27) is always open for us, ushering us into the life of communion with God and offering entry into his Church. It is possible to cross that threshold when the word of God is proclaimed and the heart allows itself to be shaped by transforming grace. To enter through that door is to set out on a journey that lasts a lifetime. It begins with baptism (cf. Rom 6:4), through which we can address God as Father, and it ends with the passage through death to eternal life, fruit of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, whose will it was, by the gift of the Holy Spirit, to draw those who believe in him into his own glory (cf. Jn 17:22).

To profess faith in the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is to believe in one God who is Love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8): the Father, who in the fullness of time sent his Son for our salvation; Jesus Christ, who in the mystery of his death and resurrection redeemed the world; the Holy Spirit, who leads the Church across the centuries as we await the Lord’s glorious return.

Porta Fidei 1

Reflection – The Holy Father has declared a ‘Year of Faith’, to begin on October 11, 2012, the 50^th Anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, and to last until November 24, 2013, the feast of Christ the King.

I will feature over these next months, in order, the complete document announcing this year, Porta Fidei, as a way of helping us all prepare our minds and hearts for what God wants to give us and for what the Church is asking us to do and be for this year.

Here in the first paragraph we see the basic presentation of what faith is and what it does laid out in a compact, dense package. Because it is so dense, every phrase so packed with meaning, it may be worth breaking it down a bit, going through it somewhat slowly, so as not to miss what’s being said here. I may take a couple days just with this first paragraph, then.

The “door of faith” (Acts 14:27) is always open for us, ushering us into the life of communion with God and offering entry into his Church. So first, we see faith as a ‘door’, as an entryway into a new reality. The new reality is communion with God and membership in the Church. Faith opens up this new reality for us—our communion with God does not just happen automatically or by virtue of natural processes: it is through faith, and is bound up with our entry into the Church. Right away here we see that the whole business is a matter of relationships, of some kind of exchange of persons. Faith is, in its essence, a sort of conversation that brings us to a new level of knowledge about reality. This new knowledge of faith then changes our relationship both to God and to humanity.

It is possible to cross that threshold when the word of God is proclaimed and the heart allows itself to be shaped by transforming grace. God starts the conversation, in other words. Faith comes from the proclamation of the word of God, and its reception by the human heart. But even this human reception of the word is a result of transforming grace. Faith right away, then, is a matter of ceding the center of gravity of our being from our own selves and our limited human way of thinking and acting towards God. His word, and especially the words and deeds of Jesus Christ, opens up the divine level of reality to us, and his grace, the mysterious action of the Holy Spirit, makes it possible for that word to find a home in us.

To enter through that door is to set out on a journey that lasts a lifetime. This door of faith does not, then, simply lead us into a simple room where we are at once at home in our happy destination. Rather, it is a door leading us on a pilgrimage. Instead of being a door into a house, we might say it is a door taking us out of the house into the Great Outdoors.

This is actually very significant. We are all, at the beginning, ‘Inside’. Inside our our humanity, its limitations, its narrowly conscribed dimensions. God’s word and the grace of the Spirit lure us out of this nice and cosy, but rather cramped, house. Come away, O human child, Yeats’ fairies call to the unwary. God calls out similarly to us: come out, come out, wherever you are. Come out of human caution and human prudence, human thinking and human loving.

Come outside and play. It’s a beautiful Day. And so the door of faith swings open, and we unwary ones (made unwary by the Spirit’s gift) run out into the wild adventure of life.

To be continued…