Seeing Jesus

Listening to a talk by Bishop Fulton Sheen the other night, he gave the reminder that we were taught to pray, "Our Father, not my Father," and that we, "see the face of Jesus in the face of the poor." This takes our invisible Lord and makes him visible. It helps calm our doubts, and helps us to feel the amazing warmth and love of God.

We can experience this most powerfully by going to help those who are the most needy: Feeding the homeless, counseling the despondent, bringing the gospel to the faithless. We need to do these things when we can (something some of my brave friends do far better than I). But we also need to recognize that everyone is poor or broken at times, in their own ways.

By recognizing the needs of those in our daily lives, and showing them compassion we can all feed the poor every day. Most of us eat several times a day. And we need emotional and spiritual sustenance each day as well. Be a friend, be a brother, look past what people ask for, and give them even more. "For if we can not love the people we see, how can we love God, who we cannot see."

Romancing the Rocks

For the longest time, I misunderstood romantic love to be the love between a man and a woman. The love properly ordered toward marriage. But I am beginning to understand that there is romance in everything.

Also, along the same lines, romantic love is often tied in with sex, as if the two went hand-in-hand. It's not that the two are entirely unrelated, but properly ordered, most romance is not sexual in nature (or perhaps, as taught in John Paul II's Theology of the Body, it might be better to say that not all our sexuality is ordered toward sexual activity).

Romance starts with our experience of the beautiful, whether something looks beautiful, sounds beautiful, smells beautiful, and so on. But it is not only from the experience of the senses directly, but also the mind. We can experience a beautiful idea or a beautiful personality.

Thus, we can "fall in love" with things as well as people. We see a beautiful mountain in the distance, and we want to get closer and climb it or touch it. At the least we want to take its picture, so we can preserve a part of our experience with the mountain to bring with us.

One of the things that helped me realize the greater dimensions of romance was having children. You fall in love with the beautiful little faces, the cute voices, the new personalities. You want to hug them and kiss them. You can sit and stare lovingly at them (when they aren't driving you crazy).

Of course, each love, for each person and each thing, is unique, but they are not an entirely different kind of thing. They are different in intensity, they have different components, they are associated with different roles and duties, but they are all loves of the beautiful.

And properly ordered this all points to God. As Plato discovered using pre-Christian philosophy, God is the perfect beauty, and the source of all beauty. And as the the scriptures tell us, Christ came as Lover, to be the bridegroom of the Church, to unite himself with us in a kind of heavenly marriage.

So all that is beautiful, all that we love, should remind us of God. We should be thankful for all the good that he presents to us here on Earth. And when we marvel at the beautiful things he has given us, we should feel even greater awe, wondering how much greater is the source of all beauty and love.

The "Question of Coercion"

I recently came across this challenge to the faith in an Amazon book review:

My belief in God, if not out of love or a want to establish a relationship with God, would be based on nothing more than coercion:

I want a pleasing and pain-free after life; I want to be as happy in the after-life as I am with life, but I don't have or have a desire for a relationship with God; therefore, I may be cast to hell (which, according to this book, I've created). If I want to be happy in the after-life, I need to establish a relationship with God. I don't want a relationship with God either because I don't believe one can exist or I don't believe a relationship with God is beneficial for either participant; however, I want to avoid discomfort and joylessness. I'll establish a relationship with God so I do not experience pain or joylessness.

Unless I missed it, Tim doesn't address this, and I think it's quite possibly the most difficult obstacle for any organized religion; I would like the author to address coercion without resorting to "you've misunderstood the point of God's love."

I would say that the first problem with this "question of coercion" is that it ignores what Christians believe heaven and hell are. Heaven is a place where we are happy because we are in a relationship with God; therefore, if we truly want to be in heaven, we want a relationship with God. Basically, what the one who asks this question wants is to have a part of something without having the whole. He wants to live in a man's house without asking that man if he can come in, and without acknowledging the man once he is inside. He wants love without a lover, a smile without a face. He is separating the inseparable.

The alternative, hell, is terrible because we are separated from God. That is why we go to hell. We didn't want God, so he let us be alone. But, since God is the source of all good, we are left with no good, and thus no joy. This is a deranged choice, but we men make deranged choices all the time.

We cannot separate cause and effect. I cannot ask for sunlight, but without the sun. I think we all ask for such absurdities sometimes, and that is more-or-less the definition of sin. We want to live on a diet of candy, but without gaining weight, rotting our teeth, and having stomachaches. We want to walk through fire without being burned, but burning is inherent with fire.

Abraham and Isaac

It is often suggested that "the God of the Old Testament is cruel, quick-tempered, jealous, and warmongering." I'll address more of this later, but for now lets look at one of the cases of supposed cruelty found in Genesis 22:

Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about."[...]

Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?"

"Yes, my son?" Abraham replied.

"The fire and wood are here," Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"

Abraham answered, "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them went on together.

When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the LORD called out to him from heaven, "Abraham! Abraham!"

"Here I am," he replied.

"Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."

Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son.

Now, this can easily come off as a fairly mean thing for God to do. Ask a man to sacrifice his son, what kind of cruel God would do that?

I have felt that way when reading this story before, but then that's looking at matters in a simplistic and worldly manner. We have to consider more to really understand. It took me just a little time and thoughtful reflection.

First, we must consider our approach. Are we looking to ascribe rotten things to God? If we are, we could imagine sinister motives for even his more plainly kind actions. Are we considering other things that are revealed to us in scripture? If we do this, then the whole matter falls into another light.

Thus we turn to the New Testament and see that God is love [1 John 4:8], and we return to Genesis to try to see if there is a way to understand the story as loving. Let's take it apart, and address the different problems.

1. Isn't it cruel for God to ask someone to kill someone?

The first problem is that this assumes that death is the worst possible thing. For someone who denies the soul, death is the end. But if there is an immortal soul, then it is eternal life which ultimately matters, and this life only matters inasmuch as it affects eternity. Therefore if God takes a life, and he does so already knowing the eternal destination of the soul, then he will be sure that the soul goes to the place he knew it had chosen.

Part of the reason humans must be so careful about killing people, even exercising some restraint in war, use of capital punishment, and in situations of self defense, is because humans are not omniscient, and are not competent to judge when a person is ready to leave this world for their eternal destination.

So, if God were to ask someone to kill someone (not something he does often), he would do so knowing the positive impact it would have on eternity and the moral validity of such an action in this instance, something a human is never competent to judge.

Not that this actually applies to this situation anyway, since God did not let Abraham kill Isaac, and he had never intended to let him.

2. But it's still cruel to make a man think he has to kill his son. It's just creepy.

Now, it was certainly a painful experience for Abraham. I'm sure he walked up the mountain thinking, "will God really make me do this? Why would God miraculously give me a son, and then take him away?"

Meanwhile he is telling Isaac that, "God will provide the lamb," hoping that he's right, trying his best to trust in God, even though God has asked him to do this terrible thing.

Let us remember Abraham was the father of the faith. He knew of God, but God had not yet given the law to Moses, and the Jewish faith was in its infancy. Abraham would certainly have hoped that God wouldn't take his son, but Abraham did not have the entirety of revelation we have today. God worked over many years through many hard lessons to teach his people. He did not just pass everything to them at once.

But would such an experience build the faith, or would it cause injury to Abraham or his son? I think the results speak for themselves. Isaac was not angry with God. He passed the faith down to the next generation.

So, if it caused no harm, and it broke no moral law, what is cruel about it?

3. Why make them go through all that, what possible purpose could such a test have served?

If the test served no purpose, and accomplished nothing, then it would indeed have been cruel to force Abraham through those worrisome days, wondering if he would really have to sacrifice his beloved son. But, if the test served a purpose, then the struggle Abraham went through to pass it could have actually been necessary.

The story seems to imply that God did this just to test Abraham's faith, but if God knows all things he could have known Abraham's faith without the trauma. This means that the purpose of the test was not for God's benefit, but somehow it was for Abraham, and perhaps for us.

Abraham learned that if he has faith, and he does God's will, even when it seems like the hardest thing in the world, God will provide, and things will turn out well in the end. And God rewarded him by making him not just the father of Isaac, but the father of the Jews, and by extension the Christians. And these people would remember his faith forever, and remember the lesson that God will always provide.

But this story's connection to God's providence goes further. The story is a foreshadowing of the sacrifice that will redeem all nations.

Isaac, like Jesus, was long awaited and born miraculously. Then, this innocent firstborn son was taken up the mountain which prefigures Golgotha, and carrying the wood which prefigures the cross.

But the two stories end very differently. Isaac, who is only human, and has at least the stain of original sin, is spared by God who substitutes a sheep for Abraham's son. Jesus, who is human, but also God, and entirely without sin, is not spared. For God will suffer himself what he spares us, and his son is the lamb who dies in our place.

Do Muslims Worship Our God?

I was recently reading an online argument that went something like this:

Catholic A: Muslims worship the same God as Christians.
Catholic B: No, they don't, they worship a false God.
A: Yes, they do. The Catechism says, "The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day.[841]"
B: Yeah, I know, but that's not an infallible pronouncement, it's just "official teaching."
A: Thanks, but I'll trust the Catechism before I trust "Catholic B" from some online forum.

And so on, and so on...

I think there's a little room for a middle ground on this one. Let me explain:

Let's say you and your friend both were hired by this guy named Bob. Then you were sent to different parts of the country to do work for Bob's company. You both were to send letters each day, to the same address, to let him know how you were doing and if there was anything you needed. Bob himself would read the letters, and then you would receive letters in response from Dave, and your friend would receive letters from Fred, both supposedly being dictated to by Bob.

After some time, you compared the letters you were receiving with those your friend received, and it turned out that you were receiving some of the same information, but sometimes the information would be contradictory, as if you were being instructed by two different Bobs. Apparently, either Fred or Dave was not sending true correspondence from Bob.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is only one God, and we both know him to a degree, because we both have history with him at some point. But the teachings of Mohammad contradict the Catholic faith in many areas, so they must not be true in their entirety. What Islam has preserved intact from Christianity and Judaism is, however, true.

As I see it, this means that we do both pray to the same God, because if we address our prayers to "the one God," then he receives them. Also, to the extent that they recognize true attributes of God, they adore the same God. And finally, to the extent that they recognize the teachings and commands of God, they serve the same God.

So, to sum it up: Do they pray to the same God? Yes. Do they adore the same God? Partly. Do they serve the same God? To an extent. Do Muslims believe all we believe about God? No.

I think the Catechism attests to the idea that Muslims may love [adore] the same God as we do, but often serve a false god, when it says:

"In their religious behavior, however, men also display the limits and errors that disfigure the image of God in them: Very often, deceived by the Evil One, men have become vain in their reasonings, and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and served the creature rather than the Creator.[844]"

Another point, somewhere in there, is that God, being an actual being, and not just a philosophical concept, can be addressed or even loved without being understood. Thus, Muslims can love God and pray to God while not actually knowing him as well as Christians.

This is similar to how a child can pray to God without understanding him like an adult, or how an adult can love him without understanding him as well as the apostles understood him.