When Other People Let Us Down…

Posted: 27 December 2011

We all know people who have let us down at one time or another. Sometimes it is only in small matters and other times it is in very great matters. In recent years the media has been very vocal about priests and religious in the Church who have let us down. How can it be that those whose lives are dedicated to God fail to live out what they have promised? Should we remain in a Church where even the leaders have failed to lead with honour?

Even when Jesus Christ walked the earth he was often the target of the criticism of the Pharisees. These devout men were sincere believers but they had trouble with those who did not live the law as well as they did. When the Pharisees saw Christ eating with tax collectors and sinners they became angry, but Jesus reminded them, “those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (Mark 2:17). In the 13th century the renowned theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote a Prayer for preparation for Mass which included the words: “I come sick to the doctor of life, unclean to the fountain of mercy, blind to the radiance of eternal light, and poor and needy to the Lord of heaven and earth”.

Too often we forget that we are actually the sick. We are the ones who need our defilement washed away, our blindness removed and our poverty enriched. The Church exists for sinners as Christ exists for sinners, and if we are beyond sin, then we are in the wrong place. For 2000 years Christians have failed to live up to their baptismal call to holiness. Some seem to fail in bigger matters, but nonetheless, we have all failed. Without diminishing the difference between serious sin and minor failings, St Paul made it clear that “there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22-23). Because we are baptised into the one family of Christ, though, every time we sin through what we have done, and what we have failed to do, we bring harm to the whole Body of Christ. Thankfully, though, just as every sin weakens each of us, every prayer and faithful action strengthens each of us, and it was Jesus Christ who performed the great faithful action.

The whole reason Christ came was to give us his power and his grace through the cross. If we set our lives towards the cross and never take our eyes from its power we will receive all the grace we need; nothing is lacking in the sacrifice of Calvary. When we sin we need to repent but we must not despair. When we despair we cease to believe that the cross is enough to help us. Similarly when someone else sins in a serious way we can tend to despair especially if the failure comes from someone we hold in high esteem. We can too quickly become disheartened and sometimes cynical. We should acknowledge the significant hurt that comes through human sin and act to support and gain justice for any who are harmed. However, we must also remember that every person is a fallen human being and needs the restorative power of the cross.

In each of our lives there are moments, when, if seen by others, we know they would be scandalised. There are moments when we seem to be taken over by our fallen natures. Some struggle with pride, and some with lust, or gluttony, or greed. But let us not fool ourselves into thinking that we are not capable of falling as low, or lower, than other people. Our lowest moments are those times when we take our eyes from the cross; when we forget the love that Christ holds out for us.

In the face of our private sin and the public sin of others we always have two choices. The first is to harden our hearts and either despair or become like the Pharisees. The other choice – and I propose the only choice for those who are sinners – is to reject sin but to also cling ever more tightly to the cross of Christ. It is to ask the Mother of the Lord for the grace to continue to stand at the foot of the cross, and to be present (at least spiritually) when our brothers and sisters fall. And this last choice involves saying every day with the Apostles – indeed many times a day – “Lord, increase our faith” (Luke 17:5).

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Theology of the Body as it was in the Beginning

Posted: 21 December 2011

People ask a lot of questions of the Catholic Church, especially in regards morality. “What is the problem with sex outside of marriage?” Why is contraception immoral?” “Why does marriage have to be between one man and one woman?” People used to challenge Jesus with similar questions. At one point a group of Pharisees came up to Christ to ask him if divorce was permissible. To their surprise though He did not simply point them to the written law but instead he invited them to consider that “from the beginning God made them male and female” and created a marriage bond that could not be broken. The Pharisees complained that Moses had allowed them to divorce, but even though this had happened, Christ looked deeply at them and said “but from the beginning it was not so.”

Why direct the people to the beginning and not just the written law? Because Christ was directing them to the law written on their hearts. We exist in a fallen world, in a world where we struggle to do what is right, where the body and the spirit battle one another. However, it was not always like that, there was a time when humanity knew what it was to love God, love others and love themselves rightly. This time was before Original Sin entered the world and we read about it in just a few short passages in the book of Genesis. Thirty years ago a young Pope John Paul II began to give a series of addresses that delved back into the beginning so that we would know better the answer to the questions, ‘Who am I’ and ‘What does it mean to be human’. These addresses are known today as the Theology of the Body.

Pope John Paul saw such importance in the beginning, because he believed that even though humans now lived in a world marred with Original Sin, they carried within their hearts the remnants of what it was to live without sin, before Adam and Eve ‘ate the apple’ (there really was no apple, check your bible). In his catechesis, John Paul named three original experiences that existed before the Fall. He called them Original Solitude, Original Unity and Original Nakedness. After Original Sin these three became ruptured but when Jesus points the Pharisees back to the beginning he is saying that this is the way they are called to live. No longer does he want us to live under the weight of the law but rather to understand that when we know who we are as human persons, the knowledge of what is right and wrong wells up from within us.

In the experience of solitude, God had created only one person and God recognises it was not good that the human person be alone. This person was invited to name all the animals and through that find someone similar for himself. Yet after giving names to all the animals of land, sea and sky, the human discovered there was no one like him. Why? The human had a body and all the animals had bodies so what was lacking? The difference was that the body of the human was symbolic; it contained a person, a spiritual being. The human realised that he was not an animal or an object but he was a subject with reason and free will.

In the experience of unity God created a second being from the rib of the first being and creation was completed with male and female, equal in dignity. At the sight of the woman, the man cried out with a great joy because here was a body that also represented a human person. Their bodies had differences but it was their diversity that made true unity possible. The man and woman realised that their bodies called them to love and that they were created to be a gift to one another.

In the experience of nakedness the man and the woman enjoy a total trust and defenselessness before each other. They rest in the knowledge that the other person would never use them as an object but always see them as a person to be loved. There was a total unity between the spiritual and the physical sides of the human person.

This was the paradise we were created for but we all know something changed.

That change was Original Sin and it ruptured all the future generations understanding of what it was to be a human person. It was as if a great amnesia came over humanity. It has become hard to sense God in our lives and recall that we are spiritual as well as bodily. The differences between men and women became seen as obstacles and causes for blame. There became a tendency to use one another, in their lusts men dominate women and in a confused desire for love women allow themselves to be used. Everything has been turned upside down.

When Christ is speaking to the Pharisees he is also speaking to every human person and he invites us to simply remember who we are. Every moral question has an answer at the dawn of creation. This was the whole reason Christ came; to point the way out of amnesia and remind us that that “in the beginning it was not so.”

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