Now when the multitudes saw it, they marveled and glorified God,
who had given such power to men.
(Mt 9:8)
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
According to Athanasius the Great (De Incarnatione), the fact of our Creator touching His Creation with His own Person elementally changed everything. The télos of our lifeworld flipped from a destiny of eternal death to one of eternal life.
Do you hear what I just said? The conception of Jesus Christ in the womb of the Most Holy Theotokos effected a basic change in our entire lifeworld .... which was then revealed by the Cross, the Harrowing of Hell, and the Resurrection. The Incarnation, of course, is the crossroads of human history. Nonetheless, surrounding us from the beginning and to the present time is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Yes, this phrase was unknown in the Holy Scriptures until Jesus uttered it. Nonetheless, man had always been surrounded by angels, had always been loved by God, had always been born as children of God to come to a fullness in His Image. Abraham and Sarah, their grandson Jacob, and no doubt other Patriarchs and Matriarchs lived in a fluid situation, in which the voice of God was heard, in which angels ascended and descended, and where all people everywhere might worship Father God under Heaven's open skies, not in one place, in Jerusalem, but everywhere.
The Kingdom of God, the love of God, God's mysterious solicitude to the creatures who bear His Image was not new at the Incarnation. On the contrary, this was, and is, the principal truth about the human lifeworld. And our relationship with God, therefore, has always been the primary fact about our lives. The Chronicler writes,
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The Lord searches all the earth for people who have given themselves completely to him.
He wants to make them strong. (2 Chronicles 13:9) |
He searches humankind for hearts like His own, people who will requite His great love and to whom He might entrust the work that must be done on account of that love. He is our Father .... in some ways not unlike any father or mother. Many of us have felt His guiding and nurturing Hand and have heard His call upon our lives. And on the day that we responded, our lives changed basically and radically forever.
Angels do indeed surround us going hither and thither. Several years ago, a young woman sat in these chairs that we are sitting in and reported later that she saw an angel in our midst. She would not be the first. For many of us have seen, spoken to, and, yes, touched Divine figures. You see, Heaven is not out there.
| "But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart ....." (Deut 30:14) |
The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near, to quote the Son of God. It has drawn near, awakening us to the Presence of God, Who says,
| ".... and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." (Mt 28:20) |
We are not alone. We have never been alone. He is with us. And the noble vocation of human life is to be with Him.
People ask me, "What is my vocation, Father?" Our vocation is to be with the One Who is with us.
God is spirit. Thus, the children Who love Him must be His emissaries to the material world and laborers in His Vineyard. The sum and whole of faith life and its only goal is to unite with Him, minute by minute, day by day, always and forever. How could sinful daydreams ever find a place within that?
Sigh. But man became fascinated and, at length, wholly absorbed in his material person ..... to the point that he repudiated his spiritual part. (I think of the history of Western man.) Among those who had not quite reached this extreme, most saw a material world here and a God (if there were a God) to be somewhere out there. The founders of the U.S. republic did not believe in a God Who could hear their prayers. Following the intellectual elite of their time, the founding fathers subscribed to a belief called Deism. Yes, we seem to be surrounded by an intricate Creation, but the Divinity Who made it surely has since long departed. Some even likened the world to a magnificent clock with minute inner workings, which someday would wind down and fail.
In our own time Christians continue to contemplate God's Heaven as being a splendid city surrounded by glittering walls and gates. Most certainly it is far away, not near us. There is the here of our gritty, dying world and out there God's imperishable and marvelous Heaven.
In his landmark work, Surnaturel (The Supernatural), written during the early and mid 1940s, Henri de Lubac reflected on this widely held two-tiered construct. He traced this innovation back back to Thomas Cajetan, the sixteenth-century commentator on Thomas Aquinas. The conception of a "down here" versus an "up there" is a purely human invention founded on a translation error, de Lubac wrote. God's Creation, the High Heavens and the earth, is One — organic, inseparable, and intrinsically Divine .... all of it, Divine, at least where His graces, which are shed freely on everyone everywhere, are received in worthiness.
Henri de Lubac showed that the Greek Fathers had always agreed on this point. They never contemplated a purely natural end for the human person. But rather, each of us from the time of Eden is born into an order of grace, which is the essential fact of the human person.
These claims scandalized the Latin Rite religious authorities of his day, who condemned de Lubac's writings consigning him to an internal exile in which he was forbidden to write, to teach, or even to reflect from a pulpit. Like the Temple authorities of Jesus' time, the Roman Church jealously guarded their prerogative to admit or deny entrance into God's Presence. Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical letter Humani generis condemning these so-called "novel opinions." The pope's ghost writer was Reginald Gerrigou-Lagrange, today called the "Sacred Monster of Thomism."
Yet was de Lubac's public disgrace to have an expiration date. Pope John XXIII had hopes that he would be a guiding beacon for the general council he had been contemplating, later to be called "Vatican II." This council would undertake the herculean task of setting the Roman Church on a new footing — no longer the long winter of Scholasticism, hyper-rationalism, and Thomism, but rather the pure springs of Orthodoxy. The Council's battle cry would be Ad fontes! ("Back to the pure sources of our faith!") Henri de Lubac had already laid the groundwork decades earlier issuing a book name Catholicisme (Catholicism, 1938), which, to the astonishment of his readers, was little more than an anthology of the Greek Fathers.
We can imagine the scene.
He is considered one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century by many,
and
he comes out with this best-seller book.
With a title like Catholicism, his readers
expect to find an outline of the thought of Thomas Aquinas,
Aristotelianism, Scholasticism .....
So they buy the book and open it to the table of contents.
But what they see there astonishes them.
For the Appendix sets out an anthology of the Greek Fathers:
(Sadly, that council would be hi-jacked by men having a different agenda, but that is another reflection for another day.)
The Word is very near to us. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. The Kingdom of God has drawn near. And God's children must be roused from their worldly, even carnal, trance. For they were made to be the fellows of angels and the upright sons and daughters of the Most High.
"Wait, Father! isn't man a little lower than the angels?" Then, I ask you, "Through which angel's hands does the Lord Jesus become Present? By which angel's powers are men and women released from the horrible prison-house of unforgiven sin? Which angel brings about the miracle of the Bread of Heaven, by the grace of God?"
The Lord Jesus said to the Pharisees,
| "But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the Kingdom of God has come upon you." (Mt 12:28) |
And with this very power He has endowed His Apostles .... or should I say has awakened within them the Divinity already within them, which had lain dormant for so long? Jesus invites Peter to walk on water .... which he does for a time. People lay in the street on beds and couches "that at least the shadow of Peter passing by might fall on some of them" (Acts 5:15) that they be healed. Indeed, the Apostles of Jesus raise the dead .... as Elisha had done (2 Kings 4:32).
In this, we attest one of the great purposes of the Advent of God, which was to awaken our own Divine natures, to rouse them fromm their slumbers. As the Father's wrote, we had become lost; we did not know who were were; we did not know where we were going. But then the First Born of Creation, our Elder Brother Jesus, appeared among the adopted sons and daughters of God. He would restore our tarnished image, the Fathers wrote. He would sit for the portrait of humankind, which had been defaced (Athanasius). His image would be re-struck on the coin of humanity which had become indecipherable (Origen). He would complete the course left unfinished by Adam (Irenaeus). He would exhort the human family of God to dust themselves off and reclaim their nobility and Heavenly birthright.
He would declare to the bumptious scribes,
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"But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins" —
then He said to the paralytic, "Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house." And he arose and departed to his house. (Mt 9:6) |
Who has such power, did Jesus say? The Son of Man .... that is, we have such power. Does my use of "son of Man" trouble some of you? Then, I redouble my claim, for you are also the sons of God .... and God's daughters of God. As de Lubac suggested, ours is a world that is fundamentally Divine. Yes, it is material, but it is also Divine, right down to it roots.
This Divine power has proceeded through my own hands as it has through so many others. Late at night I was brought to a bedside in the ICU — a wife of my parish who had suffered a cerebral aneurysm; it was said she would not awaken; but if she did, she would never recover normal brain function. I laid my hands on her praying with every fiber of my being. The next day she awakened having animated conversation with her family .... and she would walk and reclaim her former life.
I came into a hospice room late one night to visit a man who, I was told, lay only hours away from death. (He, along with his wife my aunt, were among those who raised me.) I went about the solemn rite of anointing him, whispering my prayers in deepest reverence, and with the most powerful intention within me.
The next morning happened to be Sunday, so I had to go off to a parish where I was to be guest celebrant and preacher. (You see I was visiting here in Florida.) My brother-in-law picked me up after Mass and took me back to the hospice. He said, "You're not going to believe this!" When we arrived, I could see my uncle and father, sitting up in bed wearing his football cap, munching on potato chips. And he said in full strength of voice, "Stephen, sit down! Let's watch the Giants game!"
In both cases, I could feel power (what Jesus called dunamis) flowing through me. I could feel my own intentions of love for both this precious wife and this venerable father, feeling it with a crystal clarity and undisturbed concentration. For the grace of God calls upon our fullest attention.
I have shared with many young people, the timezone of Heaven is now. And when the Lord calls to us, our response must be, immediately, "Yes, Lord! I am here." And it can never be, "Oh, I'll back to you later." Or, "I will certainly return your call." It is now. Always now.
So commonly reported are such events following what used to be called extreme unction, that the Roman Catholic Church renamed the rite anointing and directed priests to administer it everywhere and often.
When we behold a mighty work happening right before us, we ought not say that this man or that woman whom God uses as His instrument is "a wonderworker," but rather that wonders are worked here on an earth, which is inseparable from Heaven. Something has happened here and now. This is not an occasion to declare someone to be some kind of minor deity to be venerated forever. Instead, we should give thanks that God has given such power to men and women on earth.
When I became a hospice chaplain, that I must be careful, for the rooms I would visit would be filled with unseen presences coming and going. I must be respectful of that. And I must be especially respectful that the person dying is likely to see them much more clearly than I could. These so-called wonders are so commonly seen that this is taught to all hospice workers as part of their basic training.
We are all "wonderworkers" if only we would claim the powers God has always already given us. How do we do this? We do this by being the acceptable instruments that we were born to be. I guess that every child is always already an acceptable instrument.
How absurd that the great mass of humanity should wrestle in the mud of unworthiness, committing the same sins over and over, day after day, receiving absolution and then diving right back in again!
I recall the comment of a little girl during the years I served a parish. Yes, she had been to church many times, but on this Sunday, she had noticed something. She listened carefully to the prayers of confession earnestly being whispered all around her in the pews. She saw the sincere faces. She heard the reverent tones of their voices. She beheld their posture of lowliness. She could feel their sincere regret. Perhaps she saw a tear. But then, now becoming aware of this remarkable act, she was amazed the following Sunday to see them back in the same posture confessing the same sins. She asked me, "How could they be bad again so soon after all of that?"
We might say, how could so many people fail to make a real start in their spiritual journey toward God, preferring to wallow in mud that holds no attraction finally? More to the point, to borrow an image from St. Basil the Great (On the Holy Spirit), how could so many people prefer to befoul each other in the mud of sin, huddling in secret places, instead of standing upright in the light of day being filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and radiating their own Divine powers? What a choice! But how often the mud is selected. It is nearly the unanimous choice.
But the ones who seek the light of day and the Holy Spirit's powers to elevate us .... these are the ones that our Father in Heaven seeks building them up in Divine strength and sanctity:
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The Lord searches all the earth for people who have given themselves completely to him.
He wants to make them strong. (2 Chronicles 13:9) |
What is he mean by giving themselves to God? Certainly, having no part in any grave sin. And by the way, once you have given yourself to Him, sin holds no attraction but rather is revealed in its true guise of disgusting. I am amazed at how many people limp on and on and on dragging this stinking carcass called sin, refusing to let to.
And how does He make them strong? He awakens within them the bottomless pools of their own Divinity.
You see, He needs them that His whole Creation might grow into fullness of the spiritual beauty lying within it. St. Paul exhorts us,
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I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies
a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. (Rom 12:1) |
Becoming the trusted instrument through which God's mercies alight on His beloved children is not supernature but quite the opposite. It is the Kingdom of Heaven, which has drawn very near to us.
Moreover,
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.... do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,
that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. (Rom 12:2) |
Embrace these words of the Apostle Paul and take to heart the words of St. John, turning away from the world that has rejected God.
Two paths lie before us attested by the Prophets and the Apostles. God has set before us a blessing or a curse, life or death. He calls us to abundant life (Jn 10:10), yes, abundant even in the plentitude of our own Divine powers. But we cannot claim these powers, we cannot lay hold upon this life, we cannot see the Father .... until we empty ourselves of shameful unworthiness deserving of not our slightest attention. For a filthy vessel cannot be filled with holy graces that are always welling upon from Heavenly springs.
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Blessed are the pure in heart,
For they shall see God. (Mt 5:8) |
And
| "By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." (Jn 13:35) |