Over the past week and a half I had to opportunity to
attend two May Crowning liturgies, the first with St. Mary’s grade school, and
the second in the retirement community where my mom lives. Both were accompanied by songs recalling the
importance of St. Mary, mother of Jesus.
Mary was Jesus’ first disciple and is revered as the penultimate saint
whose love and faithfulness stand as an icon of holiness, faith, and love, for all of
us to imitate. Coincidentally, the
gospel readings for the past week were from chapters 15 and 16 of John’s gospel
in which Jesus exhorts us to “love one another” and to “remain in His love.” Jesus explains that, “If you keep my
commandments, you will remain in my love.” (John 15: 10) We know what God’s commandments are, and the
commandment of Jesus, that we love one another, but how exactly does that play
out in everyday life?
Following the letter of the law, but neglecting the
spirit of the law, is one of the dangers of being overly scrupulous. In perhaps the worst case example, Islamic
Jihadists kill in the name of religion, with the misguided notion that they are
somehow following God’s commandments.
For ages, philosophers and theologians have noted that all that is Good,
True, and Beautiful comes from God. In
his apostolic exhortation, The Joy of the
Gospel, Pope Francis calls for a “way of beauty,” in which “every
expression of true beauty can be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter
with the Lord Jesus.” For millennia,
classic art and literature attempted to replicate the natural beauty of the
world and of all life, including the human body. The great classics of literature and poetry
proclaim the mysteries of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation. In doing so, they reach for Truth and
Good. Modern art and literature, on the
other hand, seem to distort beauty, or mock it by constructing grotesque caricatures
of life and nature. Similarly,
literature has taken a turn away from truth and beauty by glorifying all forms
of human desire and holding up individual happiness as the greatest good in
life. And of course this is the daily
fare in our entertainment industry. The
innate beauty of the human body and our sexuality has been perverted and
reduced to nothing more than a means of self-satisfaction. Fertility, our greatest gift, and the
opportunity of bringing new life into the world in a loving, permanent
commitment of love, must now be abated or destroyed, so as not to interfere
with our carnal desire. This is a
perversion of the Truth, and does great violence to the Beauty of our creation,
especially when children conceived “by accident” are seen as a burden and an
impediment to our happiness.
The absence of beauty in the world has left a hole in our
thinking. People instinctively seek
beauty and admire it, even more so than logic.
That’s just the way God created us to think and react. But beauty is easily perverted. For example, if we fall in love with
ourselves, we put our own selfish desires first and define good as what’s good
for us, first and foremost. When the
common good is redefined to serve personal freedom at all costs, the good of
society and civilization is put in peril.
This is exactly what is happening in America where the right to personal
happiness is now commonly perceived as the greatest good, and even a “civil
right.” In order to perpetrate and
perpetuate this lie, our language has been distorted so that these new “civil
rights” are made to sound noble and logical.
The euphemisms “women’s health” and “reproductive rights” conceals the
Truth that we are thwarting our fertility and when that fails, killing unborn
children in the name of personal happiness.
Similarly, “marriage equality” is meant to sound fair and noble even
though it is a subterfuge for imposing secular beliefs on those who hold, as
matter of religious belief, that children have a natural right to both a mother
and a father, and that human biology itself reveals the Truth that man and woman
are created to be complementary, both physically and emotionally.
In our fallen human nature, it is impossible to overcome
our sinfulness on our own. Fortunately,
God Himself saves us from ourselves. Not
only has He sent His only begotten Son for our salvation, but He also sends us
His Holy Spirit. This Sunday we
celebrated the feast of the Ascension of Christ. Before He ascended into heaven, Jesus
promised His disciples that He would send the Holy Spirit who would baptize them
“in the Spirit,” and empower them to overcome evil as they went into the world
to spread the gospel. When we receive
the Holy Spirit we get a glimpse of our own beauty as sons and daughters of God. This, in turn, inspires us (notice the root
of the word inspire?) to surrender
ourselves more fully to the love of God, and to our faith which enables us to
detect the Truth and see through the lies so prevalent in our increasingly
secular society.
The Holy Spirit concretizes beauty in the Church, which
puts it this way in The Catechism of the Catholic
Church: “The Spirit prepares men and goes out to them with His grace, in
order to draw them to Christ. The Spirit
manifests the risen Lord to them, recalls His word to them and opens their
minds to the understanding of His death and resurrection.” (CCC 737)
We need the mystery of Christ to be present in our lives
because He reveals the Father’s plan of loving goodness. When Jesus commands us to “Love one another”
He is calling us to rise above our selfish desires and laziness, so as to love
sacrificially, as He loves us. This is
the True path of Goodness and Beauty. These
Truths are far more meaningful and important than the constant drumbeat of
secularism which promises happiness only when we rend ourselves free of the
shackles of religion and make ourselves gods. This is a boldface lie. The wondrous Truth is that the authentic path
to happiness and joy is ours through the incomparable way of Beauty that comes
to us through the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which we celebrate next
Sunday.
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