"Ashamed"

Does not this sad word, ashamed, describe the society in which we live?

To take but one example, speak out unashamedly on marriage as being exclusively the union of one man to one woman, then look around the room. You will learn a hard lesson: you stand alone .... at least publicly. Yes, people may come to you later and explain why they had to be "prudent" in not supporting you. And I suppose there are well-intentioned people who tell themselves they are being compassionate, but it is not compassion to rob our children of decency, whose basic definition is life under God's life-giving plan. It would be better, Jesus said, that a millstone be hung around your neck and you be thrown into the sea than to do such harm to a child. What would He say about destroying their entire moral lifeworld?

But why do I debate these issues? They are not open to debate? To be ashamed of God's "Book of Life," to be ashamed of Jesus' teachings, is to offend Almighty God.

What is it that emboldens people to offend God? The man known as "Darwin's Bulldog," Thomas Huxley, an apologist for Charles Darwin's revolutionary theory, was asked, "Why is it that the dry technical journal that published Darwin's "Origin of Species" sold out?" No issue had ever sold out before.

It sold out, he replied, because the word went round that Darwin had gotten rid of God. The implication was clear: if God can be gotten rid of, then the world becomes an "anything-goes" proposition.

One hundred sixty years have passed since Darwin's Theory was published. But it takes time to get rid of God. After all, He is present and sublimely real to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, today, tomorrow, and forever the same.

Yet, the past two generations have made a fine art of ignoring the Almighty, coinciding with the revolution of self-publishing which is the Worldwide Web. You see, you grant yourself moral permissions. People click on your lifestyle permissions, and you click on theirs.

God has either been reinvented as a senile, old grandfather with a great white beard who just wants everyone to be happy (to borrow C.S. Lewis' words). Or He is flatly denied altogether.

Serving a Roman Catholic parish twenty years ago, I saw that "anything-goes" life. It had mainstreamed even among people in their seventies. At a retreat I offered, an elderly woman took the microphone and asked, "Why shouldn't I date different men each week? I lead a full social life, and I have a normal, healthy sexual appetite."

I looked out at the faces of the two hundred or so people sitting around her. The older women especially nodded in approval, murmuring, "Yes, why shouldn't she?!"

I said, "The Catechism of our Church is clear on this subject."

Immediately, these parishioners pushed back. "Who can define sin?!" they demanded.

I replied, "Oh, that's easy to do. The Catechism is online. Just search for the word 'sin,' especially 'grave sin,' and begin your meditations there."

They could scarcely believe my lack of sophistication. For I apparently had no received the memo: Catholic truth had gone to higher plane. I recalled a similar dilemma faced by the dicastery commission that drafted the Catechism (my own tutor was on it). Modi (that is, "suggestions for modification") flooded in from bishops all over the West. They suggested that the Ten Commandments be removed from the draft. "Who can define sin?!" they demanded. "Hasn't the Church gone to a higher place?!" they asked pointedly.

I saw the depth and breadth of Fr. Karl Rahner's influence over the Church. His fundamental option asserted that the love of God overwhelms and burns away all sin. The faithful conclude that sinful life does not matter, one way or the other. Only God's love, which transcends our earthly lives, matters. Do you love God? Does God love you? There's an end to the matter!

When I followed my bishop's direction to seek spiritual guidance at a well-known Trappist monastery, my "Father Confessor" rejected my confession. "There is no sin where God's love is present," he told me. And I learned first-hand during my stay that promiscuity was a primary form of fellowship among these monks and priests.

I could see the network they had formed. Diocesan priests went on retreats at this famous abbey. They brought their theology (if you can call it that) into the confessionals. And the militant senior citizens I met were full of the "new religion." That is, an enormous segment of Christians in the West are not only ashamed of Jesus' teachings. They have a new Jesus to take His place: a meek, little man who just wants everyone to love each other. And Heaven? Don't worry about that, the new religion teachings. The new Jesus will sweep everyone into Heaven on account of His famous mercy.

Here is a new religion .... that would have been unintelligible to the Twelve, to the Gospel Evangelists, or to the Church Fathers — a religion that is all mercy but no justice. "Sin? There is no sin," the Trappist abbot told me.

I am reminded of Cicero's great juridical dictum. It is the attorney's first duty to demonstrate that his client did not commit the crime. Failing that, he must demonstrate that it isn't a crime. Isn't that where we are today? Whole populations, even priests and monks, who live lives hateful to Heaven but who blandly maintain that nothing is wrong?

Meantime, other populations of faithful Christians, do not know where to go. To whom can they turn? Only months before my parish retreat, the bishop of that diocese greeted a packed cathedral on a weekday night: inquirers into the Roman Catholic faith. He told them that Roman Catholicism was a particularly rigorous form of Christianity. They nodded vigorously and in relief, for that is exactly what they sought. They did not care about theology, really. They only cared about a Church that was faithful to Christian morality.

They were refugees. The Mainline Protestant churches, the Anglican Communion, the Old Catholic Church, .... all of these long since had distanced themselves from Jesus' teachings. They did not want their children trained up in immorality, endorsed by the Church.

The Episcopal Church to name one formerly influential church (nearly 30% of all U.S. presidents were Episcopalians) has seen its membership fall in recent decades from 3.4 million to 1.3 million communicants (by their own reckoning). According to the Pew Research Center, only 57% of those current members believe in God. Fewer than half say that religion is important in one's life. About one-quarter go to Church at least once a week. 18% believe that religion should have any say in morals.

Some people think it odd that we at the Hermitage, formerly Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic, should now be Russian Orthodox. But Russia is only two time zones from the Hermitage, and the worldwide Anglican Communion (of which the Episcopal Church is the American Province) is less than one-fourth the size of the Russian Orthodox Church. But those details do not matter. What matters is, the Russian Orthodox Church is unashamedly Christian. She is not ashamed of Christ and His teachings. And she will never bow before the secular culture. The crucible of the Bolshevik Revolution, during which 100,000 priests were murdered, prepared her for such a time as this.

Undeniably, we in the West live in a spiritual wasteland. As a university chaplain and now as a farmer working with young people, I ask them, "What is your highest goal? What is it that drives you forward in life?" Nearly all have the same answer: "I want to be happy." Certainly, this is in keeping with the trend of secular civilization. I think of the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832), who defined the good as that which promotes happiness or pleasure among the greatest majority. John Stuart Mill agreed.

The American ethos, set out in the Declaration of Independence holds that the "pursuit of happiness" should be uppermost in any person's mind. But, of course, the devil is in the details. The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, an Anglican who did not believe in a God Who could hear our prayers, much less answer them. And this outlook was shared by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison, who drafted the U.S. Constitution. They had gotten rid of God in the space of their personal lives .... though they saw the utility of religion and its adjunct, public morals, to restrain the excesses of the multitude: mob control .... that was Benjamin's Franklin's opinion. But they had little use for the Bible, much less the flinty prophet it features as God's Son, a King who burns the cities of those who ignore Him.

People have asked me whether I might not sugar-coat my message to attract more people to Christianity. My practical answer is, "Survey the liberal churches of the past two generations that have done precisely this, and you will be calling the roll of the dead and dying." Those who reinvent God damn themselves. They damn the people they influence. And they offend Almighty Heaven.

But I am not interested in practicalities, not where ultimate questions of life and death are concerned. I look out on a world that is lost. Picture your own neighborhood. Go up one side of the street and down the other. How many of these people love God and display His way of life in the living of their lives? My heart aches. The way is narrow! (Mt 7:14). Straight is the gate! (Ibid). Few there will be who find it! (Ibid). Many are called, but few are chosen! (Mt 22:14).

And we will reply, "But Lord, Lord, we ministered in your Name!" And He will look into our faces and say, "Depart from me, ye evil doers. I tell you that I never knew you" (Mt 7:22-23).

So many, many people have no hope of Heaven. Nothing is more heartbreaking especially to a priest who has cared for thousands of souls over a period of thirty years. So week after week, now and until the end, the Hermitage offers reflections galvanized with this urgency: meditating only on God and on the Sacred Scriptures and Sacred Tradition, which reveal Him. God does not sleep. Yet, so many, many of us go through life "sleepwalking." How else could people live the lives they do? How could they if they knew and believed that God and His holy angels were privy to each and every detail?

Many years ago, the rector of an Anglo-Catholic parish I served imploded. I had been his curate for only a few weeks when he came to me on a Sunday afternoon informing me that he was leaving for Africa in the morning. Later, I learned the he had filed for divorce on his way to the airport. A week after that I discovered that he had mortgaged the church property taking the equity-line checkbook with him. We then uncovered a $16,000 invoice for new vestments: a chasuble, two dalmatics, and an Altar frontal. Finally, women began coming forward. They had had sex with the rector .... on multiple occasions. The bishop came to the parish informing the people of the priest's suspension on the earliest possible Sunday .... pending due process of justice. That is, it was a date that picked itself. At the Mass the Epistle lesson read,

The parish treasurer came over to me, visibly shaken. "Judgment is falling!" he said in a quavering voice. "Indeed," I replied, "He is the Lord of Hosts, and He will not be offended."

Years later, I left the Roman Catholic diocese I served in order to offer my humble ministry to Haiti. Finally, I was among people in the pews whom I could honestly call, "the faithful." Serving them were the living saints. Light shone off of their faces. Here was the love of God. I had never been so close to Heaven. It was palpable. I was no longer surrounded by luxury and comfort and plenty, which has the effect of distancing us from the Kingdom of Heaven. Here, midst poverty, suffering, disease, and death, God's Presence was powerfully felt. Why should this be so? It just is.

I worked for Franciscan sisters who had been handed a small ministry a quarter-century earlier. Their house's superior, the ministry's COO, had developed it into the largest NGO in Southwest Haiti, serving a quarter-million people a year. She was humble and kindly and absolutely faithful setting an example of prayerfulness and gentle charity that was infectious.

I happily relinquished all claims to my former life in the U.S. And the Church had given me the go-ahead, both in Haiti and in the U.S., to become chaplain to the Missionaries of Charity (Mother Theresa's religious order). Finally, my life was set. Here is where I would pour out my ministry day after day, faithfully, and here I would die and be buried.

Then, on a day, the president of the 501(c)(3), which was the legal structure for our ministry, contacted me. He was going to install his daughter as the new CEO of the organization. I quickly learned that she was antagonistic to the Church "and all its rules." Before long, she introduced her partner, a founder-director of Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, who would replace our Franciscan COO. The new leadership team came to Haiti and announced that the word "Catholic" would be removed from our signs and materials. Our chapel would be suppressed. All crucifixes and other Christian symbols would be removed from the premises. No one on staff was to self-identify as being "Catholic," at least not in their official capacity.

I appealed to the local, Haitian bishop whose diocese owned the property, but it soon became clear that his highest priority was to ingratiate himself to the new regime.

I returned to the States to meet with the organization's elderly president, visiting him at his home. But it was clear that the die was cast. There would be no remedy.

During that week I took note of the lections on the Sundays framing my urgent visit to the United States. On the Sunday of my arrival, the Gospel lesson read,

The Sunday that followed, marking the day I planned to return to Haiti, featured this Epistle lesson:

During a phone call, I pointed this out to our organization's president. He commented, "I don't go in for that sort of thing." I left him with this question: "Have you no fear of God?"

I leave all of you and myself with this same question, which we ought to ask ourselves every morning and every night:

Do we live every moment of our lives in the sure knowledge that omniscient God does not sleep and that His holy angels are privy to all our thoughts and doings? And sin is sin. And wrong is wrong. And up is up. And down is down. Do we believe these things?

God takes no pleasure in being reinvented, misrepresented, or having words put in His mouth .... any more than we do. He is a dread Sovereign. He is the Almighty. He is the Lord of Hosts. And He is the only Reality. It is a miracle of greatest compassion and solicitude that He will hear our prayers. But make no mistake about it: He will not be meddled with. And He will not be offended.

In the darkness of our restless hearts, we strive to break every rule and throw off every perceived restraint. But we shall never be free until we wear His yoke and pray as our forebears did:

The servitude which is perfect freedom — this is our guiding light, and this is our liberation: Jesus and His Teachings, without hesitation and without shame.

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.