As enlightened as we think we are in the twenty-first century West, we must speak of what is observable: that as a civilization, we have backslid into more-developed versions of former paganism and barbarity.
Our technological and scientific successes have created a façade of development, an illusion of advancement. We think we are so progressive and advanced, when in fact we are actually regressing as a human civilization. We have constructed a house of cards but have convinced ourselves (and forced the rest of the world to believe) that our foundation is steady and our current trajectory noble and beneficial to humanity.
We are at such a level of delusion and confusion that the singularity of God and his Son, Jesus Christ, is overshadowed by a subjective collection of personal deities. Regressing back to the times of pagan myths, we have placed Jesus Christ into a peculiar pantheon of false gods of our own devising. The Lord Jesus is trivialized and made to be one more personal god.
When humanity abandons God’s own revelation of himself, then anything is justified. Anything can become a god. And even Jesus Christ can be turned into anything a person wants. This also means that the Lord Jesus cannot be fully known, loved, or followed. For when the God who is Love has been deformed and turned into something other than what he truly is, then love itself becomes deformed. When the Creator is abandoned, the creature diminishes. As Love is abandoned, our ability to love shrinks. Only in the full truth of the living God, and through his Son, Jesus Christ, can we fully know love.
Pope St. John Paul II taught in his encyclical, Redemptor Hominis:
Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer “fully reveals man to himself.” If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity, and value that belong to his humanity. In the mystery of the Redemption man becomes newly “expressed” and, in a way, is newly created. He is newly created! (10).
If the true God is abandoned for personal deities animated by the world’s fads, not only are we unable to know what love is, but we also cannot truly know ourselves. Full self-knowledge, too, is possible only through the mystery of Jesus Christ. John Paul II continues:
The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly—and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being—he must with his unrest, uncertainty, and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must “appropriate” and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself.
On one occasion early in my priesthood, I was venting to a mentor about the lack of knowledge or gratitude many people show toward the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ. It was discouraging for me to see so much indifference to the loving kindness the Lord Jesus has for us, and I was giving voice to this frustration.
This particular mentor was a senior priest who in his decades of priestly ministry had seen pretty much everything. As I moved from point to point, he gently and kindly nodded his head. After a while, I finished my diatribe, and he gave me a good stare. Then he said to me, “We tell people, ‘Jesus loves you,’ and we think they understand. We get frustrated when they don’t respond to the love of Jesus Christ, which we think is so clear.”
He cleared his throat and continued with a stronger pitch: “But we take so much for granted today. We say, ‘Jesus loves you,’ but people don’t understand Jesus, love, or even themselves. We have to start with the basics, with an initial proclamation of Jesus, of love, and of ourselves before God. We have to learn from the early Church and proclaim the gospel anew to a generation of unbelievers. Only after we give this core teaching to those around us can we truly say that people have dismissed the invitation Jesus Christ offers to us of his saving love. Otherwise, people are only rejecting what they do not understand.”
We all have to learn these truths. I’ve had to learn (and re-learn) them as a disciple and as a priest. The truths of God are so different from the lies of our fallen world that we need the constant help of grace and the witness of others to know God, to love him and others, and even to love ourselves. Either we choose this path, or another path will be thrust upon us.
And so, as a neo-secular form of paganism takes over the Western heart, all the world’s preoccupations—pleasure, power, comfort, autonomy, human affection, the market, political parties and ideologies—come to form a broken pantheon in the cosmos of fallen humanity, devoid of grace and marked by a raw restlessness that cannot be filled and only compels ever-greater expressions of self-worship and a will to power.
The early Church announced the oneness of God alongside the coming of the Messiah, the long-awaited anointed Savior. This announcement lent itself to the proclamation:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us (1 John 4:7–12).
The gospel inspired the early Church to present the one God as merciful and kind, slow to anger and abounding in goodness. They showed that he was not cruel, nor barbarous, nor petty. They showed the way of God to be a way guided by reason and love, part of a binding covenant that makes us the children of God. The early Christians’ faith, way of life, and message modeled for the fallen world the tenderness, affection, and loving affection of God.
As believers, we need to examine our own hearts. Have we fallen prey to the tendency to create our own gods, or to change the one true God so that he is merely a reflection of ourselves or our own beliefs and desires? Do we understand the radical singularity of Jesus Christ and abandon all notions that run contrary to his teachings and revelations? When we speak of God’s oneness, do we also speak of his love and kindness for all?
Fr. Kirby has more insights on how we can authentically walk with God in his new book, Real Discipleship. Buy it here.