FAITH WE NEED

THE FAITH WE NEED

The Human Dimension

            Faith is believing. We often believe in something or, more painfully, in somebody who might turn out to be quite different from what we believed him to be. Faith is often credulous: we are taken in by our wishes, by our fantasies, above all, by our yearnings, by our longing for something or someone who will satisfy us to the very depths. The law courts and especially the divorce courts tell the tale too often. We are often let down, and the more often it happens, the faster our faith disappears. The person who has let us down has lost his credibility with us, as we say. Faith means acceptance: acceptance of someone’s words, for instance, and behind the words, the person we accept. Faith also means that other people can accept our words and us. It leaves us vulnerable. It leaves us open to the possibility of betrayal.

            Yet, without faith, it is impossible to live. Every time, for example, we accept a cheque we include the possibility that it will turn out to be a dud that will bounce. And yet our whole financial system depends on faith or trust. When we marry we do so in the firm belief that our spouse is faithful. We don’t expect scientific proof for such ordinary and highly-esteemed beliefs in life. A chemist does not demand that his dinner be laboratory-tested for poison before he eats it. The detective does not consider his wife’s fidelity an open question until she has been placed under round-the-clock surveillance. The traveller does not wonder where his plane is going until he has mastered the techniques of navigation and scrutinised the data of the pilot. In these and a thousand more important matters daily life proceeds by a faith the rejection of which is considered nothing short of insanity.

            At the deepest level we put our trust in life itself. We believe that life is fundamentally good. Our faith discovers goodness at the heart of things. The result, though, in many cases, is cynicism, the attitude that is summed up in the adage, “Blessed is he who expects nothing for he shall not be disappointed.” For despite our disappointments we go on believing. Why? Because, basically, in order to survive at all we must have an almost animal love of life. It is a basic commitment to life, to survival, to the sheer insistence on going on. It is a belief that the basic hunger, the huge yearning inside all of us be satisfied.     

Faith in Jesus Christ

            The Christian can build on this because the Resurrection of Jesus Christ supports his basic faith in life. Christ’s Resurrection is our own recurring resurrection. The Resurrection of Jesus can tell us something when life gets us down. Jesus was killed by cruel men but he was raised by a loving God. The Resurrection tells us that when the worst happens the best happens as well. It tells us that our basic belief in life is quite right. Our deepest instincts are pushing us in the right direction, pushing us into the ever-open future: not a pie in the sky, but eternal life now. That is what all the simplicity and subtlety of the Christian creed is about. We don’t just recite it; we surrender ourselves to it.

            Thus, for the Christian, faith is centred on Jesus Christ. Faith involves a special kind of perception which discovers a special kind of meaning in certain experiences. The meaning of these experiences entails awareness and some understanding of God. The experiences may be of different types: intellectual, emotional, vivid, cumulative, social, solitary, delightful, terrifying, contrived and spontaneous. However, religious experience is not itself faith. But faith is a response to religious experience, that accepts as valid the awareness and understanding of God that the experience engenders. It is God who provides what is religiously experienced and who enables human beings to experience it religiously. He makes it possible to find meaning in religious experience and to assent to that meaning as true. But the assent itself is an act of human freedom, though enabled by God.

            The essential act of specifically Christian faith is an assent to the discovery of divine meaning in Jesus Christ, i.e. Jesus Christ as the personalised venue of divine salvific purpose, present and acting in us. For the average Christian believer, the experience of Jesus Christ, at least initially, appears to be a second hand perception: the perception of Jesus about whom one is told by others. Christian revelation, after all, is transmitted by tradition. The written Bible is the outstanding and normative example of tradition, though not exclusively. By virtue of his experience of Jesus Christ, the Christian by faith assents to the Gospel. That is, the good news that in Jesus Christ God is revealed as invincibly loving and as rescuing human beings from every kind of evil that they do or suffer in order to lead them into perfect union with a goodness that is absolute and eternal. To be drawn towards Christianity is to suspect that this is true. To begin to be a Christian is to believe that this is the most important of all truths. And to live as a Christian is to make the supreme value of this truth the ultimate standard of human freedom.

Man under the obedience of faith

            In his very being man is confronted with the will of the Creator. There is an inescapable decision to be for or against God. For his own salvation and the good of his fellowmen man is bound to the obedience of faith; to care for and nourish his faith is a lifelong task. The Christian life is a symbiosis with the Lord (cf. Rom 6, 8; Col 2, 13), a progressive death to sin and a renewal of life (Col 2, 12; 2 Cor 4, 10-11). What a Christian has acquired once and for all he must develop and perfect (cf. Rom 6, 5-14). The “new man” (Eph 2, 15; 4, 24; 2 Cor 5, 17; Col 6, 15) is characterised by the loss of autonomy. He is no more the source of his own life, the author of his own actions. Gal 2, 20, “and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now lives in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Hence, the Christian’s moral life is an extension, prolongation and unfolding of the life of Christ. Christians are authentic children of God even here on earth, possessing by grace the same divine nature as their Father in heaven (cf. Eph 1, 5; Gal 4, 5). The Christian cannot and need not reproduce Christ’s deeds materially, but he must adopt Christ’s manner of thinking and judging (1 Cor 2, 16, “but we have the mind of Christ”), be inspired with his sentiments, copy his virtues, imitate his charity, and have the same filial piety towards the Father (cf. Rom 15, 5; Phil 2, 5).

The Faith of Mary:  i. “Porta Fidei”, pp. 22 – 23 (read)                         ii. When the Faith of God entered into Mary, that very faith empowered her to answer her great “yes” with a complete hope for the future. She would be faithful, strong and reliable. The first among the disciples, the one whose discipleship never fails, the woman who does not deny, does not betray, does not leave her child and run away. Mary is the virgin daughter of Israel who bears a Son, who says to the God who calls her to carry God’s own Son and birth Him in our world. She is the lowly handmaid who will be called “blessed” by succeeding generations, she has the Faith. Her will is to do “the command of the eternal God” (Rom 16, 26), even if it means walking the hard road from Nazareth of Galillee to the place of the Skull outside Jerusalem. From the Maid of Nazareth she will become the “woman n the hill”, the woman of faith who replied to the angel Gabriel: “Be it done unto me according to your word.”                                           The function of Faith is nowhere more vividly exemplified than in the response of Mary to the sufferings of her Son Jesus. Jesus’ mother was a daughter of the nation Judah. She imbibed the innocent suppositions of her people. She understood that she was to conceive and bear the Messiah. But where were the proofs?  Her Son showed no sign of being Israel’s saviour; rather, she saw him heading for disaster, seemingly unable to avert his fate. How could a disgraced, crucified man be the Messiah? The answer is faith. Only through faith and steadfast loyalty was she able to surrender her conceptions of the Messiah.

After the Ascension of Jesus, the Beloved disciple John took Mary into his own. We too take her home and give her pride of place, even though we humbly admit that our house is not always in order. The brokenness of sin, the evil of destructive attitudes towards the neighbour, the lusts of the flesh - all these destroy our homes and make them unfit for our Blessed Mother to live in. Yet today we shall offer our brokenness to Mary, the Mother of health, trusting that she will transform them into something beautiful for God.

Health does not mean physical fitness and muscular power; rather, in the mind of Mary it means the capacity of surrendering our whole selves to God whatever be the state of health, whether we be on the bed of pain, or handicapped by injury or ailment or mental torture, we can offer ourselves to God through Mary. That is health. And those who do so are in very good health.

MATTHEW 8:5-17

Friends, today in our Gospel Jesus praises the faith of a Roman centurion. How often the Bible compels us to meditate on the meaning of faith! We might say that the Scriptures rest upon faith and remain inspired at every turn by the spirit of faith. One of the most fundamental statements of Christian faith is this: your life is not about you. This is not your project. Rather, you are part of God's great design. To believe this in your bones and to act accordingly is to have faith. When we operate out of this transformed vision, amazing things can happen, for we have surrendered to "a power already at work in us that can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine." This is precisely what we see in the lives of the saints: Mother Teresa moving into the worst slum in the world in an attitude of trust; Francis of Assisi just abandoning everything and living for God; Rose Hawthorn deciding to take cancer sufferers into her own home; Antony leaving everything behind and going into the desert; Maximilian Kolbe saying, "I'm a Catholic priest; take me in his place." This is how faith transforms the Christian life

Prayer:

         O gracious Lady, beloved Mother of God and our loving Mother, from where shall we learn Faith if not from you, sweet Maiden who said “Yes” to God’s invitation to carry the Saviour in your virginal womb, and nurse him at your breast? You followed him with a mother’s concern right through his ministry, accompanied him on his cross-laden ascent to Calvary, and became the sorrowing woman on the hill. Through faith and steadfast loyalty you treasured the mysteries of Jesus in your heart, and have made them ours, so that whatever happened to you and Jesus must happen to us: a holy life and happy death in God and community in him forever. Amen.

MARRIAGE IN THE LIGHT OF CREATION, FALL AND REDEMPTION

Marriage in the light of Creation, Fall and Redemption

The whole notion of marriage is so confused in our time, even among Catholics, that we desperately need to recover some basic and foundational truths. The mini-catechesis on the sacrament of marriage in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (¶1601-1617) proceeds in light of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. Marriage, it states, belongs to the order of redemption, is under the regime of sin, but is grounded in the order of creation.

John Paul II wrote regarding marriage: “Willed by God in the very act of creation, marriage and the family are interiorly ordained to fulfillment in Christ and have need of His graces in order to be healed from the wounds of sin and restored to their ‘beginning’ [back to creation], that is, to full understanding and the full realization of God’s plan.” (Familiaris consortio 3) This major claim, along with its undergirding theology of nature and grace, is developed throughout John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them.

The Word of God teaches that the redemptive work of Christ reaffirms and simultaneously renews the goodness of creation – and hence of marriage, of the human body sharing in the dignity of the image of God, of the complimentary sexual differentiation of man and woman, and of a faithful, reciprocal, and fruitful love. Yes, in light of the redemptive work of Christ, the Catholic sacramental tradition teaches that the sacrament of marriage renews and restores the reality of marriage – given that it is savagely wounded by the fall and our own personal sin – from within its order.

Thus, the grace of marriage communicated by the sacrament has two main ends: first, that of healing, i.e., of repairing the consequences of sin in the individual and in society; and second – and above all – that of perfecting and raising persons and the conjugal institution. “According to faith the disorder we notice so painfully does not stem from the nature of man and woman, nor from the nature of their relations, but from sin. As a break with God, the first sin had for its first consequence the rupture of the original communion between man and woman.” (CCC 1607)

Gaudium et spes summarizes all of this: “This [marital] love God has judged worthy of special gifts, healing, perfecting and exalting gifts of grace and of charity.” (49)

This two-fold effect means that the grace of the “marital sacrament is not a ‘thing’ added to the reality of the couple from the outside; rather, the couple itself is and must become the living sign of an invisible reality of grace,” as Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet puts it. There is an intrinsic relationship between the natural order and the order of Christ’s grace such that grace renews the fallen order of marriage from within, orienting it to its proper ends.

Grace penetrating fallen nature and renewing it from within (“gratia intra naturam”) means there is an essential continuity in man and a link between creation and redemption. “Endowment with grace is in some sense a ‘new creation’,” says John Paul.

“New creation” does not, however, mean that grace is a plus-factor, a superadded gift, to the order of creation. Rather, nature and grace, creation and re-creation, the sacrament of creation and redemption are united such that God’s grace affirms and simultaneously renews the fallen creation from within its own internal order. As the Catechism puts it, “Jesus came to restore creation to the purity of its origins.” (2336)

Elsewhere, the Catechism explains, “In his preaching Jesus unequivocally taught the original meaning of the union of man and woman as the Creator willed it from the beginning. . . . By coming to restore the original order of creation disturbed by sin, [Jesus] himself gives the strength and grace to live marriage in the new dimension of the Reign of God. ” (1614-1615)

This sacrament not only recovers the order of creation but also, while reaffirming this ordinance of creation, it simultaneously deepens, indeed, fulfills the reality of marriage in a reciprocal self-giving, a joining of two in a one-flesh union that is a visible sign of the mystery of the union of Christ with the Church. (Eph 5:31-32)

The unity attained in becoming “two-in-one-flesh” (Gen 2:24) in marriage is grounded in the order of creation, and it is affirmed and simultaneously renewed and restored in redemption. Since continuity exists between creation and redemption, we can understand why John Paul II sees marriage as “the primordial sacrament.”

When we look at the visible sign of marriage (“the two shall be one flesh”) in the order of creation from the perspective of the visible sign of Christ and the Church, which is defined in Ephesians as the fulfillment and realization of God’s eternal plan of salvation, we can see John Paul’s point. He says, “In this way, the sacrament of redemption clothes itself, so to speak, in the figure and form of the primordial sacrament. . . . Man’s new supernatural endowment with the gift of grace in the ‘sacrament of redemption’ is also a new realization of the Mystery hidden from eternity in God, new in comparison with the sacrament of creation. At this moment, endowment with grace is in some sense a ‘new creation’.”

Let’s be clear that he calls it a “new creation” in the specific sense that “Redemption means. . . taking up all that is created [in order] to express in creation the fullness of justice, equity, and holiness planned for it by God and to express that fullness above all in man, created male and female ‘in the image of God’.”

Thus, nature and grace, creation and re-creation, the sacrament of creation and redemption are united such that God’s grace affirms and simultaneously renews the fallen creation from within its own internal order. For JPII and the main Catholic tradition: “Marriage is organically inscribed in this new sacrament of redemption, just as it was inscribed in the original sacrament of creation.”

© 

                                                         

OUTSIDE THE CHURCH NO SALVATION?

Is There Salvation Outside the Church?      

“All salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body.” (CCC 846)

It’s pretty clear in the Gospel, isn’t it? Jesus says, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

This sounds clear: “Jesus is the only way to God.”

When you combine this with the teaching in the third chapter of John’s gospel the message is even more stark. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Whoever believes in him [God’s Son] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”

In other words, the default setting is that a person is condemned. Spiritually dead. Going to hell. 

This is where the doctrine of original sin comes from — that humanity’s default setting is down.

This is not very nice to hear because we want to think that most people are not really so bad. “What? Come now Father, do you really mean those nice, polite people who live next door are headed for hell unless they believe in Jesus Christ? You mean those nice, interesting non-Christians are all on the slippery slope? What you mean all those pleasant enough, decent enough ordinary folks are on the “down” escalator?”

We want to think that if there is a hell that maybe just maybe people like Judas and Hitler and Pol Pot and that guy in Ohio who enslaved those three girls — that maybe they go to hell — but not all the nice ordinary people who like hot dogs and go to ball games and theme parks with their kids and do the best they can. That wouldn’t be fair would it?

I too feel that way on my optimistic days, but then on other days I look around (and worst of all I look in the mirror) and I acknowledge that the default setting really is original sin and original sin is not just being a mass murderer, a tyrant and a child killer, but the most obvious evidence of original sin is that I have made myself my own god. 

When the realism hits hard I realize that I am convinced at the basic level of my existence that I am the center of the universe and that its everybody else who has the problem. 

I may not do many terribly wicked things, but that doesn’t really matter because almost everything I do is conditioned by what I am going to get out of it, how it affects my ego and how this action or decision is going to feather my next, make me feel better about myself and promote my own self-interest.

KNOW THYSELF

“KNOW THYSELF”

As Pope John Paul II correctly notes at the beginning of his encyclical Fides et Ratio, “The admonition Know yourself was carved on the temple portal at Delphi, as testimony to a basic truth to be adopted as a minimal norm by those who seek to set themselves apart from the rest of creation as ‘human beings’, that is as those who ‘know themselves.’”

Reading even a few pages of Walker Percy’s wonderful book Lost in the Cosmos shows that most of us don’t really know ourselves. We know a lot about the world, the stars in the galaxy, and how to make trucks and pizzas, but very little about ourselves. It wouldn’t take much reading in ancient Greek philosophy to arrive at the same conclusion. Knowing ourselves is not our natural default setting. It requires effort, discipline, and wisdom.

And yet, if knowledge of ourselves is so important – important to our being as distinctively human beings – and if most of us don’t have it, how do we attain it?

One problem with the admonition “Know Thyself” is that we already live in a self-obsessed society. Plenty of young people, and adults, spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about themselves, paying endless attention to how they present themselves to others, so much so that one of songwriter Paul Simon’s famous lyrics is: “These are the days of miracle and wonder/

This is the long distance call/ The way the camera follows us in slo-mo/ The way we look to us all.”

I see many young people acting in everyday life as if they were being filmed. They are posing as if they were in a movie, wondering what the best shot, the best angle, would be. Do we want to encourage more of this obsessive self-absorption? Clearly not. But merely watching oneself isn’t the way to get at the truth about oneself; it is often merely another avoidance strategy.

For many years I have asked my students to fill out a “self-knowledge survey.” Most don’t finish it, but that’s my point. My question to them is, “Why was this so difficult?” It’s not as if I asked questions about integral calculus. These are questions about themselves, and since they presumably had spent their whole lives with themselves, the questions should have been easy. But most students didn’t find them easy, and it was clear they wished to avoid thinking about the questions altogether.

I once had a student who asked me whether she could answer the questions about her sister rather than herself: “I could do this really well for her, not so much for me.” Walker Percy also asks, “Why is it that in your entire lifetime you will never be able to size yourself up as you can size up somebody else – or size up Saturn – in a ten-second look?” The Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote: “Oh would some Power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us.” Would we see ourselves better, more honestly, if we could see ourselves with the eyes of others? In some ways, probably, yes.

And yet other people’s judgments are often as shallow as our own. And their perspective on our inner lives is limited. My student thought she knew her sister well enough to fill out the “self-knowledge survey” for her, but it’s not so clear her sister would have agreed. Many of us feel that we’re “misunderstood” because our best intentions, along with our deepest thoughts, hopes, and dreams, often remain invisible to others. How could they know what I hold in my heart? Others can never really know the good I hope to do or the evil by which I am tormented.

So where am I supposed to get this all-important self-knowledge? This was one of the key questions that drove not only ancient philosophy but also, as Pope John Paul II suggests in Fides et Ratio, cultures and wisdom traditions around the world throughout time.

Christianity has always proposed its own distinctive answer: We can only “know ourselves” truly when we can see ourselves the way God sees us. As our Creator, He knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows not only who we are, but who we are meant to be. He sees clearly, without invention or illusion, both the good and the bad, the way only someone who looks with the eyes of love can.

“Every man remains to himself an unsolved puzzle, however obscurely he may perceive it,” wrote the authors – John Paul II among them – of the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes). How, then, to move forward in wisdom? The two passages John Paul II quoted in every one of his encyclicals were these:

Gaudium et Spes, 22: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For. . .Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”

And Gaudium et Spes, 24: “the likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God’s sons in truth and charity. . .reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”

We come to know ourselves not by forsaking our obligations and loved ones in order to “find ourselves” on some mountaintop in Tibet, but in worship, receiving the sacraments, and loving one another as God has loved us.

“Oh would some Power the gift give us, to see ourselves as God sees us.” We cannot fully find ourselves except through a free gift of self – to God and to others. This is the wisdom Christ brought; it is the Christian response to the challenge of the oracle at Delphi.

© 2017 

SOLITUDE, THE POWER OF

The Power of Solitude

When Being Alone Means Being Closer to God               

Solitude is a powerful spiritual discipline that is often overlooked by many Christians - adults and teens alike. Between the multitude of church activities, school, and even social networking, taking time out to be by ourselves with the Lord is often one aspect of our faith we put into practice far less frequently than we should.

WHAT IS SOLITUDE?

Basically solitude is being alone. It is the absence of distractions like people, computers, schoolwork, television, cell phones, radio, etc.

Solitude can be getting away from everybody in a weekend retreat or just locking yourself in your room for an hour in peaceful quiet. The reason solitude is a spiritual discipline is that "alone time" can often be a more difficult task than we think. It takes effort to be sure you are not disturbed.

WHY DO WE AVOID SOLITUDE?

The simplest and most common reason we avoid being alone with God is that solitude forces us to face everything in our lives head on. This internal confrontation is often why solitude is one of the most difficult spiritual disciplines. Yet, without time alone with God the aspects of our lives that need the most work often go ignored or unseen.  Others also keep us from solitude.  There is all kinds of pressure to be social and "get out there" and experience life.  We're often discouraged from spending time alone, because to others we're not taking advantage of the life God gave us.

 However, God also wants us to spend time knowing ourselves, too.

WHY IS SOLITUDE IMPORTANT?

It is when we are most by ourselves that we realize God is actually right there with us. At that point the solitude allows us to grow closer to God as we begin to address the things going on in our lives, thoughts, and existence.

We are able to see clearly, through a Godly perspective, what is important in our lives.  When we spend time in solitude, we get away from all the things that distract us from our reality.  We see inside our lives, our thoughts, and our behaviors.  Solitude brings us peace that we just can't get when we're surrounded by others.  It allows us to decompress and take the stress off of our day.  Yes, sometimes solitude can grow loud with the clanging of thoughts bumping around in our minds, but at least that clanging is just our thoughts and not mixed with the cacophony of noise the world brings in.

BUT HOW DO I FIND TIME FOR SOLITUDE?

We live in busy, busy world where time alone is not always rewarded. So, solitude does take effort and persistence. While sometimes we think of solitude as long periods of meditation, often we have to be more creative about it. Sometimes we may only have a few minutes to be alone with God. We may find a few minutes before we get out of bed in the morning, on the walk to the bus stop, or in a peaceful corner during study hour. We need to learn that it's okay to tell others that we just want to be alone, and tell them in a way that helps them understand this isn't a slight against them, but just our way of letting our spirits breathe a little bit.

 There is a reason that solitude is a spiritual discipline, and we all have to work hard to be sure we are getting that "alone time" with God.

WORLD COMMUNICATION DAY 2017

MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS FOR THE 51st WORLD COMMUNICATIONS DAY 2017

Fear not, for I am with you» (Is 43:5): Communicating Hope and Trust in our Time Access to today’s media makes it possible for countless people to spread news - good or bad, true or false - instantly. I wish to address all those who are daily sending out information. I encourage everyone to engage in constructive communication, and help us to view the world with realism and trust. For this we have to break the vicious cycle of anxiety and stop the fear resulting from our focus on “bad news”. Let all of us work at overcoming discontent and the resignation that evil has no limits. In Communications Industry which thinks that good news does not sell, and where human suffering is turned into entertainment, there is always the temptation for pessimism. I would encourage the search for creative communication that concentrates on solutions for a positive attitude towards life and offers “good news” to our people. Good news Life is a story waiting to be told and everything depends on the lens we use to look at things. For us Christians, that lens can only be the good news, “the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” It is good news not because it has nothing to do with suffering, but rather because suffering is an integral part of Jesus’ love for the Father and for all mankind. Through Christ, God has told us that we are not alone. Through Christ, hope is born, for everyone, where God’s love is poured into our hearts and makes new life blossom. Every new tragedy in world history can become a setting for good news - to build anew. Confidence in the seed of the Kingdom Jesus frequently compares the Kingdom of God to a seed that releases its potential for life precisely when it falls to the ground and dies. In that life, hardship and the cross of weakness and failure do not obstruct, but bring about God’s salvation. This is how hope in the Kingdom of God, silently takes root like a seed, matures and deepens in our hearts. Those to whom the Holy Spirit grants keen vision, can see it blossom. The horizons of the Spirit Jesus is our hope, our Good News. By the power of the Holy Spirit we can be witnesses and “communicators” of a new humanity. Confidence in the seed of God’s Kingdom and in the mystery of Easter enables us to communicate with the conviction that it is possible to highlight the good news in every story and in each person. Those who entrust themselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, realize how God is present in every moment of our lives, to write the history of salvation. Hope is the thread with which this sacred history is woven, and the Holy Spirit, is the weaver. We nurture this hope by reading the Gospel. Today too, the Spirit continues to act by opening new avenues of confidence and hope. From the Vatican, 24 January 2017

NATURE AND GRACE

NATURE

Grace builds upon nature, as Thomas Aquinas teaches us, and we can draw a few conclusions from that dictum. The first is that if the natural has been denied or depraved or reduced to rubble, the evangelist must set about rebuilding that foundation. You can preach to a heroin addict, but you must at the same time be re-forming him, so that he will be addicted to heroin no more, and will instead be an ordinary human being who can breathe freely with a sound mind and a sound body.

The second is that nature is our ally. She is not omnipotent. Tolkien’s figure of uncorrupted nature, Tom Bombadil, though he is not tempted by the rings of power, is not sufficient to destroy the evil. But we do not require that nature be omnipotent. We require only that she be herself.

Consider how many of our political conflicts are predicated upon denying nature, or upon embracing the unnatural and perverse. Any farmer’s kid could tell you the difference between a cow and a bull, but we pretend for political purposes that it is all a matter of perception. Our grandparents did not have ultrasounds, so they wondered about the sex of a child before it was born. We are more sophisticated now. We wonder about it after.

What we say about nature we may say also about culture, by analogy. It is natural for human beings to dwell in a culture; it is natural and good for them to revere their forebears, to remember the deeds of heroes, to cherish works of beauty and truth that have been bequeathed to them, to order their days by feasts that elevate them above their own time, and to bend their knees together in prayer to God who has blessed them.

In man there is no nature without culture, and all cultures build upon human nature. Any division between them is factitious: as if you could talk about the nature of the wolf as separate from the pack.

Now, we are fallen creatures, and our cultures also are fallen; and in our time, we risk falling beneath fallenness itself, falling into the void. Never in the history of man has there been a people without culture, without any strong memory of what has come before them: without folk art and music, without the common lived experience of poetry, without heroes that everyone honors, and without the communion of worship.