Life, Liberty and America

American Independence is a celebration of true freedom. A gift won for us at the price of men's blood such freedom is not free.  St. Paul declares that we should use our freedom "to serve one another through love" Galatians 5:13.  He is also aware that we could use our freedom to "devour one another" Galatians 5:14.  Indeed, a gratuitous embrace of boorishness haunts us and creates the worst forms of poverty. What we do with freedom, how we honor the sacrifices of others who won it for us, is a solemn responsibility. To serve or to consume the life of others designates the great battle unfolding before us on this Independence Day.

At stake in this battle is the sacredness of life itself. Rancor and strife in our communities is not the result of using freedom to serve the gift of life. Not the reversal of a court decision threatens our society but fifty years of reckless. Now more than ever a culture of life or death is before us. If we want a culture of life, we need to make decisions with great care.  It takes no care at all to use another person, to appropriate them to a political cause or for personal gain.  This is to devour them. Instead, how careful we must be if we desire to build each other up and attempt to be of some service to the neighbor God has entrusted to my care.

The the care we need to show one another is discerned only under the standard of holiness. That is, in order to find our bearings in these confusing times, we need to remember the sacred. From the very dawn of humanity, the sacred has been our orientation point to navigate our way through the chaos of life.  God's holiness is not indifferent to the plight of humanity or the social challenges we now face.  Instead, God, in all his transcendent otherness, has freely chosen to implicate Himself in the misery that has robbed us of true freedom. 

Human freedom is sacred because it is in the image and likeness of the eternal freedom revealed by Christ crucified. The Cross reveals the freedom of the Father who sent His Son into our hostility toward holiness.  The Cross reveals the freedom of the Son to embrace our hostility and suffer it unto death.  The Cross reveals the freedom of the Spirit to communicate the love that overcomes death -so that we too might be free and raised up with Christ.  As Saint Paul observes, this freedom needs goodness and truth or it becomes a self contradiction. This freedom needs to serve life. 

If we accept it, the goodness and truth that He offers goes beyond an individual experience - it is meant to be something that we share together in an eternal friendship too great for this world to contain. Every human person and all of us together are meant to bear each other up in freedom and in the perfect liberty of love to help each other thrive as sacred beings - beings who image the very likeness of God in the visible world.  With help from Above, we can help one another live lives pleasing to the Living God even here, below.  This is what a great civilization does - and it could be what we has a people choose as well.

If we turn to the holiness of God revealed by Christ, we could build together a civilization of love where no one is treated as a mere means to an end. Without God in recent times, we have failed to rise above the incivility of regarding others through the eye of self-serving calculation. Moving forward, whatever we choose will either take us beyond the gravity of our own egos or else weigh us down in self occupation. 

Conversely, when we lack the advantage of divine horizons, the scope of liberty cannot see beyond self-interest. Freedom easily succumbs to the merely self-serving.  Within the limits of the convenient and familiar we live by herd instincts at once alienated and manipulatable. Yet something in us rebels against this and we feel in our hearts the need to go beyond where our technocracy nudges.  If we call on God, He can render us vulnerable to the ability to choose what is good, holy and true, not only for oneself, but together with others. Here, horizons of greatness open before us as a people. In this solidarity, could choose to make doing something beautiful for God and neighbor our task together.

Thus, the Thrice Holy God opens up a choice between life and death.  Without the Holy One, we can only choose death. With the One who makes us holy, though faced with death, we can also choose life.  Such choices define us not only as individuals but as a people. 

If we still desire to be a great people, it is time for us to choose life as individuals, families and a nation. Indeed, individual states will now have the freedom to debate this and to decide what sort of societies they would like to be. To choose a culture of life is to build a civilization of love. Indeed, love rebuilds what we have destroyed - the Holiness of God manifests itself precisely in such love. 

Here, with the help of the Holy One, we can build a civilization that has space and courage to welcome the gift of another no matter the cost.  Here, we do not need to worship at the dark altars of technology and commercialism, but we can step into the fresh air of kindness and mutual forgiveness in the light of God. Here, we might rediscover what it means to be free men and women.

Any society, no matter how affluent and powerful, damns itself when it condone that attitude that one must be deemed desirable to join club humanity.  Such a society devours rather than serves life.  In our country, what has this "devouring" of one another beget but a cacophony of manipulation and hatred?  Treating life as if it were a mere product that we might choose or not among other material things has torn down the social fabric that genuine freedom needs. 

The sacredness of life demands more. A society that ignores the sacred devolves into chaos.  Unaware of the sacred, we gratuitously accuse, shame and gaslight because we are too wounded, alienated and afraid to accept the sacred truth about life.  If confused about life, then we have lost clarity on sex and gender. Because we cannot freely welcome the way things are as a gift from the Holy One, we are vulnerable in a labyrinth of self-definition where everything is an unbearable burden.

Accepting life as a gift or seeing it as a burden opens either to the pathway of life or the pathway of death.  The Holy One invites us we see our neighbor as a gift, even if yet in the womb unseen. The choice He unveils comes down to whether one regards life as a sacred gift or merely biological burden. It is the Holiness of God that gives us that chance to choose between these two ways, but the choice is ours.

St. Teresa of Kolkata observed to the leaders of our country that it is the greatest poverty to believe that another must die so that one might live as one wants.  For those who treat life in the womb as a burden - whether personally or socially - they have already chosen this extreme spiritual poverty.  It is even worse for those who treat human life as a commercial opportunity to be exploited for personal and corporate greed. Yet there is a whole industry that deals in the parts of baby's bodies that we ignore our laws to protect.  

To treat life in this way is a gross monstrosity of the liberty we were meant to have. To ape freedom in this way does not increase dignity but wounds it. To choose what is beneath our dignity never builds the solidarity of a great nation but shatters it.  Yet, wounded and shattered is exactly where a large portion of American Society is.  

Billy Graham once observed that he could think of no problem for which Jesus was not the answer. He has called us to freedom. As we grapple with the sacredness of life and spiritual poverty as a people, God is also at work, ready to support us when we choose life. He can heal what is wounded. He can make whole what has been shattered. If we turn to Him, we will find answers to the difficult questions that vex us as a people and as individuals.

Mother of Hidden Light

She remembered, 

Shrouded in Faith's Night, shocked silence:

That nail splintered wood, 

Those fastened hands 

Dripping in pulses of Love Divine

And human heart, stretch in final 

Blessing, the Word's 

Wordless cry echoed 

Obedient between fingers holding 

Her heart even as He gives all away, 

The Word's wordless agony pierced even deeper: 

Oh anti-thesis of all that was promised! 

She suffered that blessing, but 

She stood firm. Until

Later this new steadfastness 

Filled Peter and John,

Whose secret she shared as they

Witnessed to burial cloth and head coverings set

Apart in a tomb robbed of death, and

In shared memories of this emptiness

She prayed. Until

Wind moved tongues of fire, shrouded 

In faith's night, splintered tongues told truth

to bind in love a still frail fellowship

born of spiritual maternity

And in hidden light,

found hope.

 

The Risen Lord Present in the World Today

The Lord is Risen and raised up from our sight!  He has triumphed over death -- defeating death by His death, and now this current life cannot hold Him.  The gates of the netherworld are broken and the gates of heaven thrown open wide. He enters before us to open the pathway. He emerges victorious from the battlefield with his holy humanity intact and now His humanity raises all humanity above itself, reconstituting it so that it might participate in Divine Life.  Thus, His Risen Body appears among us even after He is taken from our sight.  

He is taken from our sight and He is still present.  He suffered death but now He lives, the Undying One. Raised to Heaven, He is still with us until the end of time. How is the Risen Lord present to us?  

He is not simply present in the world - one presence among other presences.  He is present to the world through His mystical body holding the whole world together. He conquered death so that death no longer separates us from Him and so He is re-establishing everything in Himself. No earthly or heavenly power stands in the way of His love.  Nothing can resist it. Everything his presence touches is made new. 

Consider how He is present in our relations with one another.  He has so bound us together in His presence that we discover something greater than death is reconstituting our very relations with one another.  Bound together by Christ's love, a love stronger than death, we have been refashioned by faith and baptism into His Mystical Body. In this reconstituted life, His presence helps us see new possibilities that eyes still subject to death cannot see. Thus, we even find the courage to forgive and to seek forgiveness, to renounce petty grievances and to accept the graciousness of a stranger.  

Consider how He is present  in our suffering, even as we face death itself. Through being members of His Body, His risen life animates us even while our earthly bodies are subject to death.  This means that He is so close to us that we can act with the power of His resurrection in the world - providing the world a new foundation, a new orientation point, a principle of organization that surpasses everything that passes away. 

Palm Sunday

"You have stood by me in my trials and I am giving you a Kingdom."  This solemn declaration was made by the Lord even as He faced betrayal, denial, and abandonment - suffering these unto death. To enter into His Kingdom, we must follow Him down this same pathway.  This means that we will face what He has faced. To enable us to follow Him, He must purify us and strengthen us to remain standing with Him even after our sin. To the degree that we are afraid of death, suffering, and sin, we are afraid also of His mercy. But His merciful love overcomes our fear.  Accepting His mercy, we learn to see in our own life experience that sin, suffering and death ultimately do not stand between us and the love of God. Indeed, He has made of them a pathway. 

"You have stood by me." We hear these words knowing full well how often we have failed Him. Yet, He does not focus on that. He sees what is good. He chooses to be conscious of what we have done in our devotion and so He directs us to also acknowledge what He sees.  It is not that He is not aware of our sins. It is only that He chooses not to allow them to define our relationship with Him.  Thus, He said this in the presence of the Twelve: the betrayer, the nine would abandon Him and the most trusted who would deny Him. He says it also to us now.  

"You have stood by me" unveils his decision to see past our failures to a deeper mystery about us that we cannot know on our own. He gazes with hope on the possibilities of the human heart. This is because we are not in his eyes friends who fall short of His expectations. Instead, we are each a gift of the Father to Him - and so He treasures our faithfulness no matter how weak or fleeting it might be.  Thus, He confirms all that is good, noble and true. The the gaze in which he holds us never breaks - He suffers this regard of the deepest truth of our existence unto death and will search hell to rescue it.  Here, the basis of hope no matter how often we have fallen, a truth He repeats today in our presence too: "You have stood by me."  

"I have prayed that your faith will not fail and once you have turned back, you must strengthen the faith of your brethren."  Love requires many difficult purifications and painful healings before we can stand before the face of the One who loved us to the end. No unaided human effort can endure these trials of love. Yet, we never face these alone, but always in the Church with Christ's gentle presence and His mighty prayer. His prayer that our faith should not fail does not mean we will not fall.  It means that if we fall, no matter how far or hard or for how long, we can turn back - convinced that the power of His love is greater than the power of our sin.

What we do not see but what Christ sees is the splendor of His Bride - a splendor in which we have already been implicated from before the foundation of the world. Despite the sinfulness of her members and even the failures of her shepherds, she knows from the vantage point of eternity the way to the Bridegroom in both life and death. She knows this path to love even as it leads through the difficult ambiguities of our lives. She knows it by love and She knows it for love even when we have long stumbled away from it. She knows even as it disappears from our sight at the last moments of this life. And so, if we listen to the voice of the Bride, she teaches us to find it even when we feel farthest from it. Indeed, the Good Shepherd Himself will pick us up and place us there - for He has abandoned everything to find us.  Though we cannot see it, the Body of Christ knows the passage that crosses from the gates of hell to the very threshold of heaven. Christ Himself bridges this abyss - and He suffers it in His mystical body so that we might become immaculate and holy in His presence. 

Repentance and Contemplative Prayer

The story of the woman accused of adultery reveals the plight of humanity in the Cosmos.  Christ turns a circus of shame into a confessional, a heartless courtroom into a garden of encounter. The Lord's finger cultivates the barren ground of hopelessness into the fertile soil of new beginnings.

Just as when she was brought before the Lord condemned, we too stand alone, scapegoat of an oversexed culture and the object of unchaste rage. As was the case with her, all sorts of spiritual powers demand justice and point out our shame. The accusations seem well grounded and we feel the ground under our feet slipping towards death. Then Someone bends to the earth and scribbles in the dust. What once seemed firm gives way to his touch and what once faltered beneath the weight of our sin now is suddenly firm. In the aftermath of this earthquake, those who would condemn us have left and we find ourselves alone with the Great Alone. He questions us. Will we dare approach Him and stammer our reply?

If we seek Him, the Lord will draw us by his beauty.  Where he draws us is more than merely a physical place. And He stands us up and addresses us. With the touch of His finger, our accusers have lost their ground.  He draws us out of shame and accusation and into a new beginning, out of the gutter and into safe-haven, out of the pigsty and into the arms of the One who has long awaited our coming home. He does not wish us to be distracted with lesser things, so He arranges everything to free us from what holds us back: terrible trials, catastrophe, failures, voids, unbearable hardships in life and in the heart. All of these become so many thresholds to freedom when we realize that we are not alone, that He leads us through them and that, come what come may, we can trust Him. He even transforms sin into a means of grace when we surrender it to Him in sorrow. He draws us to where the longing of our hearts at last discover fulfillment. 

In the imagery of the Song of Songs, this sacred place is a vineyard, an orchard, a garden, a hidden wine cellar.  These images of paradise speak of friendship, fruitfulness, family, and feasts. In the very shadows of these rich mysteries, the original goodness and nobility given to the human heart flash anew despite it all. On this holy ground, the heart's purpose is manifest in pledges of love stronger than death. There is freedom, repentance and new resolve. In this sacred place, joy and sorrow seize the soul until it explodes with life and meaning.  The way we had always hoped things might be, we suddenly discover are unimaginably more than so.  Hidden fullnesses rush in to fill that gnawing emptiness and we who were lost find ourselves standing just where we ought to be, together, before Him whose love surpasses our every hope. 

And in that deep silence, He gazes into the eyes. The ears take in His harmonies and in the deepest down core of one's being, something new is born.  This newness is a reality for which this tired-out world cannot account and it will last long after all that is passing passes away. For as beautiful as the world in its order and ornament is, what God has done in the human heart is so even more. A new creation begins when heart speaks to heart, when the Word of the Father shines in the darkness, when He is lifted up, when He draws us to Him.