The Heart Holds a Foretaste of Heaven

Not quite a week ago, I started writing a bit about Saint Augustine’s “Of Holy Virginity.” I have now read some more of it and will continue my reflections of it. As stated earlier, Saint Augustine spends the first section of his document on explaining that virginity is a higher calling and gift than marriage. In the middle, he spends a great deal of time talking about the need for virgins not to become, therefore, proud. He talks about Mary Magdalene and how she loves much because she was forgiven much; virgins need to thank God who kept them from falling into many sins, for apart from His divine help, they would, also, have taken that unhappy path.

In the course of this discussion on the need for humility, Saint Augustine mentions Saint Paul and says: “The Apostle says, ‘But I would that all men were as I myself; but each one hath his own proper gift from God; one in this way, and another in that way.’ Who therefore bestoweth these gifts? Who distributeth his own proper gifts unto each as He will? Forsooth God, with Whom there is not unrighteousness, and by this means with what equity He makes some in this way, and others in that way, for man to know is either impossible or altogether hard: but that with equity He maketh, it is not lawful to doubt. ‘What,’ therefore, ‘hast thou, which thou hast not received?’ And by what perversity dost thou less love Him, of Whom thou hast received more?” (#41). God makes different people for different purposes, and every good thing we have and are have been given to us by God. Those who have received much, those given the grace of virginity, should therefore love the more.

So if a virgin is not to be proud, “What therefore should a virgin do, what should she think, that she vaunt not herself above those, men or women, who have not this so great gift? For she ought not to feign humility, but to set it forth: for the feigning of humility is greater pride” (#44). Although virginity is a higher gift, how one lives virginity is an entirely different matter. To begin with, all God-given vocations are a gift from Him. Also, only God is able to judge how well and truly one lives his vocation, whether it be a high, medium or low calling by God. Whatever the greatness or lowness of the calling by God, each vocation is the very path God has called that one to reach heaven. Each path lived well and faithfully leads to deep union with God.

Several paragraphs later Saint Augustine continues the answer of what a virgin should think: “She hath, I say, a subject for thought, that she be not puffed up, that she rival not; forsooth that she so make profession that the virginal good is much greater and better than the married good, as that yet she know not whether this or that married woman be not already able to suffer for Christ, but herself as yet unable, and she herein spared, that her weakness is not put to the question by trial” (#47). Yes, virginity is objectively better than marriage, but they are both good and are pathways to holiness.

We cannot judge or compare ourselves with anyone for we do not know the heart; only God sees that. People with lower vocations may love God and be ready to witness to Him to the point of shedding their blood more than those with higher vocations. The hierarchal placement of the vocation tells us nothing about the holiness of the person. Residing in the heart is the love of God that is a foretaste of heaven, and we simply don’t have access to that knowledge. The best we can do on that front is to try to examine the fruit of that heart, but even that is often done poorly and partially. Thankfully, we have not been given the impossible task of judging another’s heart. God takes care of that for us. Our job is simply to love Him and our neighbor as our self.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

Abraham's Understandable Fall

God tested Abraham a number of times during his life: He called him to come to the Promised Land, had him fight in that foreign land against four kings to redeem his nephew Lot, and promised to give him a baby of his own. Abraham passed all these minor tests very well. When God promised to send Abraham his own son, Abraham believed that God would be faithful to His promise. For his belief, God considered Abraham to be righteous. Everything looked wonderful for Abraham who always did what God asked of him and who always believed in God in his heart.

To fully and truly test Abraham, however, God would need to pass Abraham through a trial of faith. He would have to give him a test that would go beyond his intellectual ability to pass the test; the only way to pass such a test when the intellect is rendered useless is to have a full and pure trust in God. So God delayed in sending the promised son. Time is of the essence to an elderly, barren couple. Every day is like a thousand years. After about 3,650 days, when Abraham was eighty-five and Sarah was seventy-five, which seemed like 3,650,000 days, it became humanly obvious that Sarah was not going to have a child.

Sarah, at her wits end, logically and prudently discovered another path to fulfilling God’s promise: Hagar. Maybe God wanted to give them a son through Sarah’s maid. God helps those who help themselves, so it became time to take matters into their own hands. If God was going to send a son, He would have and could have and should have done it already. It must be that God wanted us to use our reason, she must have thought, to figure out a way to make good on what God said would happen. The rationalization that took place is so easy to understand and relate to for we in the modern world do this sort of thing all the time.

At our worst times, we utterly forget God and His providential care of us and think that everything depends on us. At our best, we work as though everything depends on us, but we always are fully aware that it is really up to God. The first is a totally man centered attitude and the second is God centered. The first is fueled by despair and its fruit is selfishness; the second is enlivened by hope and its fruit is the joyful and peaceful offering of self.

Sarah, understandably, gave bad advice to her husband, and he followed it and fell. All of us can relate to such a logical and reasonable and, at root, faithless response for we have all done it ourselves. Abraham, who had perfectly passed three minor tests, does not endure the ultimate test of faith. He lasted for ten years of hell, but then he fell. God needed to send him another test to purify and bring to maturity Abraham’s faith.

To pass this next test, Abraham would have to have complete trust that God would be faithful to His promises, even though what God asked made no human sense. Abraham would need to eat fully of the tree of life. How is this done? God shows Abraham through the covenant of circumcision. On the one hand, it is a penance showing that it is not by human power or ability that we have life; on the other it is a symbol of the stony heart which needs to be broken so that the heart of flesh, the heart that loves and obeys, which lies underneath the heart of stone may beat once again and trust in God no matter how absurd.

God ends up asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac; this seems to contradict God’s promise to give Abraham a vast multitude of descendants through this son. This time Abraham believes God completely, for “he considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead” (Hebrews 11:19). This will be our topic for tomorrow.


Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

Sex is Good

Over the past fifteen years that I have been pondering this theory and meditating upon it, I have shared it with many people, both priests and religious, theologians and lawyers, moms and dads, young and old, single and married, laity and consecrated virgins, writers and publishers, highly educated and not so much, and just about anyone who seemed willing to listen. There has been one main concern mentioned by two of these people, and that was the theory sounds a bit Manichean or that the body and sex is bad.

I understand this concern, but this would be a misunderstanding of the theory. I think that a closer look at the theory will show that my theory would fall apart if sex were bad. On my post of 11/15/07, I talked about how the tree of the knowledge of good and evil must be good for good people to have chosen it. In itself, it must have been a good tree; the man and woman had no inclination toward evil and no disordered passions, so choosing an evil would not have been appealing to them. The deception of the serpent was not getting them to think that the tree was good, but it was getting them to distrust God and to think that disobeying His singular command would be good for them. God had given them an extremely difficult trial of faith, and instead of trusting in Him and eating of the tree of life, they trusted in themselves for life and received death.

What I want to highlight today is that sex is good. It is the highest good of the created order. To be more precise, I mean marital relations or sex between spouses. Any sexual activity outside of marital relations open to life is intrinsically disordered and evil, but the marital embrace open to life is a beautiful and holy reality. It is the symbol of God’s relationship to man. God wants the most intimate union with humanity, and He created the marital embrace to symbolize that heavenly reality. Of course sex is not bad; it is holy and is the most awesome activity of this world. Part of its greatness comes because of it symbolism of Christ and His Church. The reality that sex is a symbol of, will only be fully realized in Heaven with God (although in mystical marriage, some of that reality is given).

Now for those partaking of immoral sexual behavior, which is anything outside of marriage that is open to life, of course that behavior is bad. It is not the sex that is bad, but it is the use of that sex that is bad. A knife is not bad; in and of itself it is good; morally, it is neither good nor bad. If the knife is used to make dinner, it is used well. If the knife is used to murder an innocent person, it is used badly and in an evil manner. Sex is far better than an object like a knife, as I said above, but even the best of things can certainly be used for evil or used in an evil manner.

Sex is meant to be used under very precise and exacting circumstances because it is so good and so powerful. To use some more analogies, it is like dynamite or nuclear power; used in the correct manner, time and place, it brings a fuller life; used in the wrong way, time or place, it brings mass destruction. Sex is like that, too. It always has been like that.

Adam and Eve were tested by God as well as were Abraham and Isaac. Each one of us is tested throughout our lives; many tests are small, and a few are large. The test of virginity (which is what I think Adam and Eve’s test was as well as Mary and Joseph’s) is still a common test today. Every priest and sister and nun has passed through that test. Married couples and singles are all called to chastity, and that is a test and a trial, too. In our sex-crazed society, purity in marriage is a challenge; singles are called to live celibate lives until and if ever they get married: that is a struggle. Many voices today say that it is not even possible or healthy to keep sex only for married couples open to life; certainly, then, this is a test. Things haven’t changed much, and it is in our faithful living according to what God wants (summarized in the Ten Commandments and the two Great Commandments of Jesus), that we please Him and are fully alive.

Mistreating sex as just another appetite to be satiated whenever and with whomever I please, only brings loneliness, separation, sickness, misery, destruction and death. The irony is that those who claim Christianity teaches that sex is evil or bad or dirty, are the ones who treat sex as no big deal; they are the ones who degrade sex and make it like simply blowing one’s nose. It is like using fine china as a Frisbee, or a rose as a hammer, or a Ferrari as a bulldozer. It turns people into objects for use, for pleasure. It degrades humanity. Treating sex as sacred personalizes people and gives them great dignity. The proper use and respect of sex breeds deep and lasting joy, peace and life; without such reverence in the face of such a mystery, there is only discord, divorce, disease and death.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

"Abba! Father!"

Last night I asked a question that I did not really answer. It may have been implied, but it was not directly answered. I answered the question about why baptism does not take away concupiscence, but I did not answer why it does not feel like anything happens when one is baptized. The first obvious response is that grace has little to do with feelings, just as much of life has little to do with feelings; they have their role, but it is a secondary and subordinate one. Living by one’s feelings is building a house upon the sand near the seashore—it feels good for a while, but catastrophe soon follows.

To discuss baptism further and in a positive light, I will examine the heart of the message of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. The center and most important part of his letter is found in the middle two paragraphs which are mirror images of one another in 3:23-4:7:
“Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.
I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no better than a slave, though he is the owner of all the estate; but he is under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. So with us; when we were children, we were slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe. But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir.”

The context of these paragraphs is that Paul is discussing how Abraham was justified by faith when he believed God would give him and his barren wife a son in their old age. God “reckoned it to him as righteousness,” back in Genesis 15, and it was not until Genesis 17 when God gives Abraham the covenant of circumcision. The big question Paul is addressing here in Galatians is the question of whether a Christian needs to be circumcised. His answer is no. Abraham had to be circumcised because he had tried to fulfill the promised son by having relations with Hagar, Sarah’s maid, upon the advice of his wife. Abraham listened to the voice of his wife and had relations with Hagar: the result was Ishmael. He was not the son God promised.

Abraham was 75 when God first promised a son to him; when he was 85 he had a son with Hagar, but that was not the son God had promised. It was not until Abraham was 99 when God gave him the covenant of circumcision that He re-promised Abraham a son. Twenty-five years after the initial promise, at the age of 100, Isaac was born to this most impossible set of parents. Isaac means laughter because his birth to such old parents was surely hysterical.

Because Abraham did not trust God Himself to provide the son but relied on the powers of his body and a woman not his wife, God provided a punishment that fit the fall. He trusted in his male part, so that very instrument, so to speak, had to be cut around. That was a painful procedure, especially at such an age, and it was a strategic strike at the symbolic root of the problem. Circumcision was added because of sin just as all the laws concerning animal sacrifices and other ritual offerings were. Israelites had to sacrifice bulls because they worshipped the golden calf; they sacrificed sheep because they worshipped goat demons in the desert; the sacrificed lambs because they worshipped themselves every time they sinned. All those laws were temporary to keep the people from falling further into sin. God is a good Father who gives appropriate and fitting penitential and medicinal punishments which are designed to bring the sinner back to Himself.

Circumcision was added as a law because Abraham, at root, did not trust in God. The problem was with his heart, his tree of life. True circumcision is circumcision of the heart; it is the cutting away of the dead, stony part to reveal the living fleshy part underneath. There is a fittingness to circumcision striking man’s “foot” as the material used in the sin, but deep down what is needed is a heart believing and obedient to God. In baptism, as Galatians says, we have been made sons and daughters of God; we have been made a new creation and given a new circumcised heart of flesh. We are born from above and become members of the new Israel of God as infants (usually), just as circumcision made one an Israelite in the Old Testament at eight days old, unless he was a convert. Baptism is the new circumcision. Instead of cutting away the foreskin, baptism imparts in our chest a new tree of life.

Now we are sons who have hearts filled with the Spirit of His Son. We have put on Christ and we make what was Christ’s our own. We become God’s children because we are now members of His Son. We have a new circumcised heart because we have been given Christ’s heart. The heart of Our Savior gave itself entirely on the cross and was cut through with a lance, pouring forth blood and water. This is the circumcision of His heart. This is the heart we receive at baptism.

Since Abraham never really trusted that God was going to give him a son, since he never fully passed the test, Abraham had to be tested once more. When Isaac, the one through whom God had promised to send a vast multitude of descendants, was old and strong enough to carry the wood for a burnt offering, it was then that God asked Abraham to kill this son of the promise. If Isaac was old enough to carry the wood for a long distance, surely he was strong enough to escape his 115 or more year-old dad. Both Abraham and Isaac willingly made the offering; there are a multitude of parallels between Isaac’s offering and Jesus’ crucifixion. For now, suffice it to say that they are images of one another. As the crucifixion was the circumcision of Jesus’ heart, so Abraham and Isaac’s sacrifice was the circumcision of theirs.

As Isaac and Abraham were getting close to offering the sacrifice, and before Isaac knew what they were going to sacrifice, Isaac said, Abba, Father, here is the wood and the fire, but where is the lamb? Since Paul is discussing all of this in Galatians, when he says that the spirit of the Son is in our hearts crying “Abba, Father,” Paul is directing our minds to these same words spoken by Isaac as he began his journey to his total self-oblation. Baptism sets us down the path that Isaac walked; it initiates us to pick up our own chunk of tree and follow our Savior as He makes His way to Calvary. The fulfillment of our Baptism is in our own crucifixion; and the Eucharist is the very heart of Jesus which provides us strength and food for this beautiful and aweful journey. On a daily basis, nourished by our daily bread, we die to our self in all the many little things of our ordinary life lived faithfully and well; we make our entire life, each and every day, each and every moment, an offering back to our loving Heavenly Father in imitation of His son who did so for most of His life in obscurity.


Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.

More thoughts on the Tree of Life

Yesterday I talked about how chapter two is a close-up view of mankind, particularly as a home for God. There are two important trees in the midst or middle of the garden of man. The first one, which they should eat from, is the tree of life. This is a symbol of the heart of man, the place where he loves, trusts and obeys God. The heart is then symbolically physically represented by the four rivers of water in Eden.

There is a very interesting passage about the heart in the Gospel of John 7:38, "He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, 'Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water'." No where does scripture mention this. It could be an indirect reference to Ezekiel 47; I am inclined to think that Jesus is referring back to Genesis 2. He who believes in God has a heart out of which flows living water, i.e. his faith gives life to those around him, and he bears the fruit of good works. Those who eat of the tree of life believe in God and so have the obedience of faith (see Romans) that trusts God especially when life is hard and does not seem to make sense.

A living faith is a believing heart that endures in time of trouble. The presentation of the tree of life implicitly signifies that a time of trial is at hand. The tree of life is needed when a battle with death is about to ensue. Immediately after the tree of life is presented in Gen. 2: 10-15, flowing with a perfect logic, God announces His singular command: "Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." God has arranged a test to see and know if the man will eat of the tree of life, if he will believe with his heart even when it does not seem to make sense.

Why does God test us? He has a problem. To put it mildly, He is so awesome and perfect and beautiful and powerful and alive and wise. Even among mortals, the extremely beautiful, wealthy and powerful have a similar problem: they do not always knows who is their true friend and who just wants what they have. God has this problem infinitely more. He also wants to preserve our freedom so that we are not just a bunch of robots who have to love Him. He wants us to freely choose to give Him our love. So He hides, and He gives those who want to draw near to Him tests to strengthen our trust in Him. Sometimes He gives incredibly difficult tests that supersede our intellect so that all we can use to pass the test is our loving trust of His command. He wants us to eat of the tree of life.

The question remains: so then what is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil...? Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2007.