Homily for 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
13th Sunday of Ordinary Time

July 1, 2018

Collect
Wis 1: 13-15; 2: 23-24
Visitation Convent, Georgetown, D.C.

“O God, thru the grace of adoption you chose us to be children of light.  Grant that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth” (Collect).

That prayer asks God particularly to protect his adopted children—those baptized into a family relationship with Jesus Christ—from the darkness of error and to empower us to stand in the light—the bright light of truth.

by Michelangelo

We know who is called the Prince of Darkness.  He began his relationship with human beings with a lie, or as Pope Francis has said, with the 1st instance of fake news, when he promised Eve that thru their disobedience she and Adam would become like gods.

God, on the other hand, has put into the human soul—not only the Christian soul, but every soul—a yearning for light, a light that comes from knowing the truth and experiencing beauty and goodness.  With good reason Bp. Robert Barron preaches that if we show people what is truly beautiful, even in a cultural sense—beautiful art, architecture, literature, drama—they’ll be drawn to God.  It’s in our souls.

God is light.  We profess that in the Creed when we say that the Son is “Light from Light.”  The Eastern Churches call Baptism enlightenment because by that sacrament we become children of the Light.  Our human fulfillment is to attain that light in its fullness.

Newly baptized is presented with a candle lit from the Easter candle

and instructed to keep this Christ-light burning brightly in his life.

We can’t be surprised that the 1st words God speaks in the Bible are, “Let there be light.”  Let the created world reflect its Creator.  So the book of Wisdom affirms that “he fashioned all things that they might have being” (1:14).  “God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him” (2:23).  We’re made for the Light, for truth, for beauty, for goodness.

Anything less is not of God.  “God did not make death” (1:13); “by the envy of the devil, death entered the world” (2:24).  Likewise the Devil’s tools of lies, error, and yes, fake news.  Likewise the Devil’s big lie that the way to happiness and the fulfillment of our deepest longings is the way of idolatry, of wealth and fame, of self-indulgence, of self-centeredness, or as David Brooks so aptly put it in Friday’s New York Times in an essay on Justice Kennedy’s idea of liberty[1]:  “The first problem with this definition of freedom is that it pushes society toward a tepid relativism.  There are no truths, only ‘concepts.’  You define your concept of the meaning of the universe, and I define mine, and who are any of us to judge, let along impinge upon, that of another?  Furthermore, it’s a short road from getting to define your own truth to getting to define your own facts.”[2]

Bishop Tobin (Facebook)

More bluntly, Bp. Thomas Tobin of Providence put it this way in a tweet:  “The Western world has lost its moral compass; it is adamantly atheistic and amoral.”[3]  We may say that it’s bumbling about in “the darkness of error.”

Did you notice on Thursday that it took less than a New York minute[4] for certain politicians and media opinionators to tell us that the debate over a replacement for Justice Kennedy should be all about preserving the “right” to abortion? That’s one vocalization of “the darkness of error” from which we pray to be preserved—or the culture of death, as John Paul the Great put it, that is rampant in the world we live in, the world without a compass.

Other vocalizations of “the darkness of error” deal with the meaning of human sexuality—is it for total self-giving, an image of Christ’s and the Church’s relationship; or is it for one’s own pleasure and recreation?  and with the very identity of sexuality—can biological gender be a lie, while the “truth” is in my head?

Bp. Barron’s latest column is a consideration of themes in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.  He compares the Jurassic series’ basic premise to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and then says, “Shelley’s point was that seizing godlike authority over nature, though it perhaps satisfies our pride and our desire to dominate the world, in point of fact unleashes powers that we cannot, even in principle, control.”[5]  So here we are, building atomic weapons and trying to keep them under control, and Frankenstein-like creating human life in labs—thru IVF, designer babies, 3-parent babies, etc.—and also destroying human life in labs with the excuse that embryonic stem cell research will help us.  Shades of “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.”[6]

Which is different only in degree from trying to save our country’s borders by tearing families apart.

Against the darkness of such errors, we pray that we might be “children of light,” children of God, and “always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth.”  That is, we pray for the courage to seek and grasp the truth, to proclaim what is true—and good and beautiful; to teach the truth, model the good, seek the beautiful in our families, among our friends, at our work, in our schools; to push for more truth, goodness, and decency in our public life.

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   [1] “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 [29 June 1992], joint opinion coauthored with Justices Souter and O’Connor).

   [2] “Anthony Kennedy and the Privatization of Meaning,” NYT online, June 29, 2018.

   [3] Quoted by Christopher White, “Tweeting bishop says social media humanizes him,” Crux online, June 25, 2018.

   [4] “New York minute”: an instant, or as Johnny Carson once said, the time between when a light turns green and the guy behind you honks.

   [5] Robert Barron, “What ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ Gets Right and Wrong,” The Pilot online, June 30, 2018.

   [6] As supposedly said by some U.S. officer during the Vietnam War, widely quoted but never specifically confirmed.