A Firm Foundation

In a previous post, it was discussed what integral human formation was and why it is key to the New Evangelization. It was mentioned that there was a classical ordering to the four pillars—spiritual, human, intellectual and apostolic. Quite obviously, spiritual is listed first because it is the most important dimension and the one on which the other three depend.

To see why this is necessarily the case, let's go back to whole purpose of why we need this integral formation to begin with. The answer is the same answer we give to all the important questions—Christ (try to come up with an important question to which Christ is not the answer). We are called to become little Christs and we do this by following a very specific pattern of development. We move from a knowledge of Christ, to a love of Christ and from a love of Christ to an imitation of Him. Finally, when we truly know Him and love Him, we desire to communicate Him to others. Spiritual formation pertains to the first three stages of development, while the other three pillars mainly pertain to communicating Him to others.

The Supreme Good—to Know Christ Jesus

In his letter to the Philippians, St. Paul says that he considers "everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ ". We all know that St. Paul did have a remarkable experience of Christ on his road to Damascus. He came to know that everything else was rubbish (the Greek word is scubula which translates into English as another 's' word that means a specific type of animal rubbish) compared to this supreme good. This knowledge that St. Paul is talking about then is more than to know about Him. I am quite sure that prior to his conversion experience during his persecution of the Christians that he came to know a lot about Jesus of Nazareth. But, he did not actually know Christ until he experienced Him. Since most of us will never have an experience like St. Paul, how is it that we actually experience Christ?

One question that used to really annoy me, but that I have come to appreciate more and more, is when I am asked "do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, your Lord and Savior?" I think because Protestants rely completely on their own subjective experience they have touched on a question that most Catholics don't ask. In fact, Catholics tend to only rely on the objective presence of Christ in the Sacraments and are annoyed when a Protestant asks them that question. But to experience Christ, there must be a mixture of the two.

Well, to get to know anyone, we have to spend time with them. The obvious answer then is that we must pray. In order to pray rightly, we truly have to understand what prayer is. There is a mental picture that often helps me to stay focused on why God calls us to prayer. When a smith plunges iron into the first, he is not just trying to make it hot and glowing; he wants to make it malleable. This is precisely why we pray—not so that God can make us hot and glowing (although this happens often), but to make us malleable. Ultimately, prayer is our attempt to break our will and conform it to God's will. That is what Christ's prayer looked like in the Garden of Gethsemane and should serve as a model for all of us.

Once we understand what prayer is, the technique we use is not so important. What is important is that we set aside a specific time during the day to be alone with Our Lord. We should give Our Lord our best time of the day, which is usually first thing in the morning. If we don't have time, we could start by getting up 10 minutes earlier. If we were promised a million dollars if we got up 10 minutes early every morning for a year would we do it? A million dollars is nice, but it is not the supreme good that Paul is talking about.

Our mental prayer must be a simple conversation in which we speak to God as we truly are. To avoid it becoming sterile, we should walk away with a concrete resolution. We should see patterns develop in our prayers that tell us what God is asking of us. Once we know what He is asking, we must put a concrete resolution in place to carry it out.

Cardinal Newman described personal prayer as "God and my soul and nothing else besides". But there is more to the life of prayer than simply personal prayer. We are also called to participate in the liturgical prayer of the Church. The Mass has been called the most perfect prayer. The sacrifice of the Logos is already accepted and is accepted forever, but through the Sacrifice of the Mass we make it our sacrifice in hopes that we will be transformed into Christ. In the Liturgy there becomes no difference between Christ's actions and ours and this is why every prayer of the Mass is directed to the Father, through the Son in the Holy Spirit. The Mass is not a private devotion, but the Church's very participation in the redemptive sacrifice of Christ. It would serve us well to spend time meditating on the beauty and the gift that the Mass is. Unfortunately, because we don't do this, we are still concerned with making our "Sunday obligation".

For Christ's Love Compels Us

Once this personal knowledge has been cultivated, it opens the gate to an all consuming love for Our Lord. Just like any relationship, once we come to know another, we also want to know everything about them. In knowing more about them, we come to love them even more. So, how to we stir this knowledge into the flame of love?

This is where we look to Mary for help. We should strive to imitate her love for Christ and should implore her intercession in achieving it.

In almost all of the artwork that depicts the Annunciation, Mary is seen reading Scripture when the angel appears. While I doubt the historicity of her on a kneeler in a nicely decorated room with a bound copy of Scripture, her Magnificat shows us that she knew a great deal about Scripture. Without, she would not have been able to "ponder all these things in her heart" and see how they fit with God's promises in the Old Testament.

St. Jerome once said that "ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ". I am very often disheartened by how few Catholics know and understand Scripture. This is the book of the Church and for the Church.
Yet, for the most part Catholics leave their Bibles on the shelves or put them on the coffee tables when they have certain guests.

I am always so surprised when I hear someone say "I pray, but God never talks to me." I ask them if they ever thought of getting an audio Bible which usually elicits a puzzled look. The point is that the Bible is God's Word and it is the ordinary way that He speaks to us. When we read it, we are meant not to merely read a book, but to encounter a Person. As God's Word it seeks to become flesh in us. The Psalms are the same prayers that Jesus said. It is time for us as Catholics to start growing in our appreciation for Sacred Scripture. This is something that our separated brethren could surely teach us.

I also hear people say that they don't read Scripture because they don't understand it. That truly is backwards. Do we only watch movies that we fully understand? The only way to understand is to read it. Jesus has promised in Mark's Gospel (4:22-25) that repeated exposure to the Word of God will result in increased understanding. By closely listening and discerning the meaning of the parable, the one who is given spiritual insight will have it increased by exposure to the parables as opposed to those who will end up in greater spiritual ignorance. Scripture has a sort of double inspiration in that the Holy Spirit breathed into the authors and breathes into the readers as well.

Mary being the first tabernacle, she would also point us to the Eucharist. Imagine the joy and ecstasy that Our Lady must have felt when she received the Eucharist from St. John the Apostle when she stayed in Ephesus with him. We too should ask for the grace to love Our Eucharistic Lord in the same way. One way to do this is to make regular Eucharistic Adoration a part of our spiritual program.

Eucharistic adoration is the most important way in which the presence of Christ continues in the Church following the celebration of the Mass, Because of this, it is meant to help us sanctify everything we do and most importantly to draw us back to our next celebration of the Eucharist. What we do at the Eucharist is to eat and drink deeply of the food of our salvation. Think of Adoration then as a way to stimulate our appetites for our next sacred meal. Pope Benedict said in one of his homilies during World Youth Day a few years ago that the "Latin word for adoration is ad-oratio - mouth to mouth contact, a kiss, an embrace, and hence, ultimately love."

Learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart

From love, we are led to imitation. One very unpopular point in Christ's life that we are called to imitate is in His Passion. We make this a vivid, living reality by our own mortification and detachment. Ever since man first sinned, penance, reparation, and spiritual war have become necessary conditions of our life.

The fact that it is newsworthy that John Paul II performed acts of penance should be an indication just how far removed we are from this idea. As followers of Christ we are called to these acts not only for our own mortification but because of the redemptive value of uniting them with Christ's suffering. Fasting has gone completely "out of style" despite its spiritual benefits.

We also have avoided the Sacrament of Reconciliation. We have come to see it in a totally negative light rather than as an encounter with the Our Lord sacramentally. In the Catechism, the Sacrament of Reconciliation falls under the sacraments of healing. Do we have a medicinal view of Confession? Do we see it as a means to obtain the grace to overcome our persistent faults? I will write about what I think should be a proper view of Confession at another time, but I invite you to take it to prayer. Ask Our Lord to show you the beauty of the gift of the Sacrament of Confession. If you haven't been in a long time, go this weekend. If you have been recently, go again, but take someone with you who hasn't gone in a while.

Next week we will continue with human formation.

 

 

Until Christ be Formed in You

In a now famous homily given during the Papal Conclave in 2005, then Cardinal Ratzinger said the following:

"Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires."

This criticism of relativism was met with a lot of hostility in the media. Thanks be to God that the Church reads not the Times, but the Eternities and this "uncompromising ultraconservative" was still chosen as Pope. Our current Holy Father has a keen understanding of Western Culture that is much needed and he sees moral relativism as the plague that it is.

Pope Benedict has picked up right where John Paul II left off. In Centesimus Annus, John Paul II said that "a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism." It is not a tyranny like Fascism or Communism, but one of raw power in which a culture that has no transcendent moral norms can only solve conflict by force. Freedom separated from moral truth becomes its own worst enemy.

In quite possibly his most prophetic work, CS Lewis spoke of the consequences of moral relativism in the Abolition of Man. Lewis said that "[F]or the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please… we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely `natural'—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.

If then moral relativism leads to "might makes right" and ultimately leads to the destruction of man, what is to be done? The Holy Father after visiting the Czech Republic last fall proposed "integral human formation to counter the new dictatorship of relativism."

In order to put Benedict's solution into practice, we need to first understand what exactly it is that he is proposing. When he says, "integral human formation", what does he mean precisely? Because of the confusing times we live in, we first we need to make sure we have a proper understanding of what it means to be human in the first place. Who exactly is man?

The Catechism has one of the most succinct definitions of the human person and it is a great foundation upon which to build a proper understanding of man. "The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual" (CCC 362). Much of the confusion about who man is today stem from leaving one of those three components—body, soul, or made in the image of God—out of the definition.

The soul is the spiritual principle in man (CCC 363). It is composed of the intellect, the will and the heart. Each of these three "parts" runs on one of the three transcendentals. The intellect is made for truth, the will for goodness and the heart for beauty. Any program of human formation must be based on seeking these things for their own sake. It must also involve fostering both the moral and theological virtues since they act directly in the soul. Prudence and faith are intellectual virtues. Justice and charity are virtues of the will while our heart is acted upon by temperance (moderates our pleasure drive), fortitude (controls our aggressive drive), and the theological virtue of hope.

Although it is the soul that gives life, it is the union of body and soul that makes human nature. The soul expresses itself in and through the body. All knowledge in the intellect was first in the senses of the body. Since Jesus is fully man, He has a body in Heaven right now. We will not be fully human after death until we receive our bodies back in resurrected form. We must therefore reject any spiritualist anthropology that sees man merely as a ghost in a machine. Likewise we must reject any materialist anthropology since human nature contains an immaterial soul. Truth is more than a mere process in the brain. The brain processes sense data so that it can be used by our intelligence.

What does it mean when we say that man is made in the image of God? The simplest thing that we can say about God is that He is Three—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What separates these three is their relationship to each other. So one of the ways we image God is that we are meant for relationship. We are ultimately social creatures. Again any authentic understanding of man must take this into account. We would answer Cain's question as to if we are our brother's keepers in the affirmative.

In the creation account, we hear how man is made in the image and likeness of God. It is ultimately the likeness of God within us that was damaged by the Fall. But properly understood what does this mean? It means that man is ultimately good, yet in many ways broken. This view is unique to the Catholic understanding of man. The majority of non-Catholic Christians would view man as Luther did. He thought man totally depraved. Now entire books have been written on these two views and combinations of the two, but in short to hold that man is totally depraved is a rejection of the fullness of the Incarnation. If the Incarnation actually occurred then God must have so created human nature that it would have the potential for so great a unity. Redemption does not eliminate or replace our sinful humanity but heals and perfects it. With this view, we can speak of grace building upon nature. The Lord takes our natural gifts and supernaturalizes them by infusing grace. It remains incumbent upon us to sharpen all the natural gifts at our disposal so that those instruments can be used by God.

John Paul II loved to quote Gaudium et Spes in saying that Christ came to fully reveal man to himself. We must always keep this in mind when speaking of integral formation. Our ideal is Christ. We have seen our model and that is the mold we are trying to fit.

With all of this in mind then, we can set out to develop a program of integral human formation that the Holy Father is calling for. The Church has always looked at Integral Formation as having four dimensions—Spiritual, Human, Intellectual, and Apostolic—that encompass all of the Christian life. In the coming weeks we will look at each of these individually.