Mass readings for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Ecclesiastes 1.2; 2.21-23 Psalm 90.3-6, 12-14, 17 Colossians 3.1-5, 9-11 Luke 12.13-21
In the readings this week the theme of inheritance arises. In Ecclesiastes we have this lament: “Sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it.”
And then we have the man in the crowd petitioning Jesus to settle a matter of contested inheritance. Jesus declines to get involved in the dispute.
The first scripture tells us, not only can you not “take it with you” when you die; there will be those who will benefit from your efforts who have not contributed to what has been achieved. That can be a cause for sadness if one senses that, not only is the inheritance unappreciated, it’s going to be squandered.
The gospel story gives us Jesus admonishing the man, and the crowd, to not get caught up with material possessions; one’s life is not supposed to be about that. Our essential task is spiritual in nature; whatever does not contribute to it really ought to be dispensed with; and in terms of what we leave behind us, what our legacy ought to be, it will be the spiritual that is important.
And in what is an occasional coincidence in theme, the epistle, in this instance the letter from St. Paul to the Colossians underlines this principle of Christian life: “Set your mind on the things that are above, not on things that are on earth… put to death, therefore, whatever is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which is idolatry.”
Yet when I look at the society I live in, I find so little in evidence of this as a civilizational aspiration. I lament the preoccupation of so many with the material, the physical, the mundane. I look with disappointment upon a Christian population and a Catholic community who have spent fifty years and more, in continuous compromise and concession to this grasping after the things of this world as the source of meaning, happiness, fulfilment, such that it is a rare and risky thing for anyone to proclaim the teachings of the Church; to instruct in what it means to follow the gospel, to fix one’s mind, heart and soul, upon the things that are above.
One wonders just what the next generation will inherit from us; because the enduring legacy is not so much the art and architecture, the technology and wealth, but the spirit that gave rise to them, the ideas that animated us and led to their creation. What survived the ancient world intact was not the buildings and art works, examples of engineering and craftsmanship, there are only fragments and ruins, but the ideas and beliefs. Christianity is one obvious legacy, and its transformational belief in the inherent value of each and every human being, right down to the least of us; and our faith, although it is rooted in the revelation of Jesus Christ, its elaboration as a moral system that gave us hospitals and an ethic of care for the poor, an artistic aesthetic that, for example, gave us gothic architecture, a philosophical framework that gave rise to modern science; all this was the fusion of Judaic and Greek thought that came about as generations of Christians sought to comprehend the mystery of Christ and his incarnation.
I find myself reflecting on what I have done with this rich spiritual legacy. Am I like the scorned “bad kings” of Israel’s ancient history who turned their backs to God and embraced foreign gods and led the innocent astray? And to be fair to myself, have I been led astray? Yet knowing what I do now, can I be as courageous as the prophets of old in my preaching and teaching, can we be like the first Christians of Judea and the Galilee, and begin to remake humanity through our own efforts toward a life of sanctification by grace and patient prayer in anticipation of the Resurrection?
The Western world has abandoned a moral vision across the spectrum of human activity with obvious ill effect on marriage and family—a vision that was lofty, noble, rational, effectual, constructive of culture, conducive to the common good, and directing the minds and hearts of believers to things divine. We have substituted a radical individualism, that not only gives primacy to emotion and subjective convictions about what a person needs to be happy, but also asserts the illogical and ridiculous idea that each person can have his or her own “truth.” The most obvious manifestation of that has been the sexual revolution that has been so corrosive of our civilization, but nonetheless embraced by Christian and non-believer alike. We tolerate shameful things, excuse our own sins, and even endorse the immorality of our children and grandchildren with the too often invoked rationalization that it’s okay if it makes them happy.
We forget the point of our lives, as confessed Christians, is holiness; happiness, or more accurately, joy, we get as a bonus.
This amoral vision is cowardly, irrational, dysfunctional, destructive of the common good, and apt to mire the minds and hearts of half-believers and unbelievers in things earthly, transient, and dead.
The Christian scholar Carl Trueman has spent many years in study and consideration of our society’s degeneration. Publishing first a well-received scholarly volume entitled, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020) a couple of years ago. He has followed this up with a more accessible book entitled, Strange New World (2022).
The core of his argument that what best encapsulates the radical individualism that rejects all outside authority, and especially the very idea of God, is found in our current beguilement by sexuality:
“[Today’s] sexual revolution does not simply represent a growth in the routine transgression of traditional sexual codes or even a modest expansion of the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior. . . Rather, it is the repudiation of such codes in their entirety. . . If the individual’s inner identity is defined by sexual desire, then he or she must be allowed to act out on that desire in order to be an authentic person.”
This is absolutely contrary to Catholic teaching. Our identity is not derived subjectively from within ourselves based on something as uncertain as desire and appetites. We can’t decide who and what we are because we don’t make ourselves, we are made; that is, we are not our own creation, but a creation of God. And not just any creation: unique in being made in God’s image. And as I’ve said before, God is, not just Love itself, and truth, but God is the fount of reason which is the master of our passions.
When the rainbow flag was raised over our ostensibly catholic schools, I think it fair to say that those who supported that, and those who acquiesced far outnumbered those who correctly discerned that it symbolized ideas about the nature of the human person that are inconsistent with Catholicism.
To credit those who pushed for it, the trustees who voted for it including the incumbent of our school district, the likely motivations were rooted in a desire to be “nice”, to be tolerant, but I would also say, to be seen as people who protect the marginalized. That is a good instinct. We don’t want bullying in our schools. Yet, I would have thought that was already a principle, not only of catholic education, but in the secular counterpart of public schools.
However, we don’t raise the flags or elevate the symbols of different ethnic and national groups to prevent the more usual bullying of the child from a foreign land; I don’t know how we would do so with regard to those who are bullied because they are short or overly tall, overweight or skinny. Yet, we did so with regard to sexuality, a subject I would have thought inappropriate for elementary school children, and to be handled delicately with adolescent teenagers in high school. It’s inappropriate for little ones because they have no notion as to what it’s all about, and so teachers inescapably misrepresent what it’s about. We are careless with teenagers in this because of their particular vulnerability as they cope with the disorientation that comes in the transition from childhood to adulthood, a transition that it is for most not smooth but fraught with anxiety.
Their heritage as Catholics is not “niceness” and a pursuit of earthly satisfactions, but a deep, profound understanding of themselves as children of God called to lives of virtue and service to God and neighbour; and this will in all events secures them meaning and purpose in this often-difficult life and eventual eternal company with the saints in light in the next.
Catholics have a positive vision of the cosmos and humanity’s natural, and supernatural, place in it. It is a call to living to higher things than immediate satisfactions that keep people captive in a host of dysfunctions that marks our current culture in every aspect of its existence: the way we organize our economy, build our cities, grow our food, down to how we form communities and families. And we continue to look for easy answers, to defer to the supposed expertise of others, to acquiesce to the questionable authority of those who govern, because too few of us are willing to actually start living as we ought, and building something truly sustainable: a culture of life.
I was recently reading about the future of the great cities that we will bequeath to future generations. You know the Empire State Building in New York City is turning 100? Does anyone here have any idea of what it has taken, and will continue to take in terms of money, engineering expertise, materials, etc. to keep that building standing for another 100 years? Can you imagine what must happen to the other skyscrapers that lacking historical significance, will gradually fall into disrepair, and then fall apart? If you want some sense of the scope of the coming problem, of how transitory our concrete, bricks and mortar legacy is going to be, go to Detroit where misgovernance and economic stagnation has killed a great city—there we have a physical expression of moral failure.
The current culture exhibits a preference for abstract and sweet-sounding ideas over the hard, harsh reality of real life, and thinks to engineer a new humanity as we would build today’s skyscrapers. The society built on those ideas will collapse into chaos faster than the concrete will crumble into ruins.
As Christians we don’t believe in ideas, we believe in the person of Jesus Christ. Through him we understand the limits of mortal flesh, but so too, do we come to know the possibilities that arise from the eternal soul in search of God, who in Christ is transformed.
We should not settle for transitory things, and we should not make them our children’s inheritance. Rather, we must give them treasure that cannot rust or be stolen away: be rich toward God, teach others to do the same.
No one can inherit faith, but they can see our witness, and by it be made curious and inquiring into the mysteries that inform our lives, give us purpose, has had the Church, produce not so much things, as glorious as a medieval cathedral is, but rather an ethos of care, concern, rationality and virtue that are the real treasure, a true inheritance.
Amen.