Food for the Soul
A bi-weekly blog on the virtuous life. Written not by a master, but by a student, but one at least who knows whence sound teaching is found.
Thomas Cole (1801-1848) The Pilgrim of the Cross at the End of His Journey. (Public domain) O my God, relying on your infinite goodness and promises, I hope to obtain pardon for my sins, the help of your grace and life everlasting, through the merits of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Redeemer. - The Act of Hope Christ is held by the hand of hope. We hold him and are held. But it is a greater good that we are held by Christ than that we hold him. For we can hold him only so long as we are held by him. - Paschasius Radbertus But they that hope in the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall take wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint. -Isaiah 40:31 The virtues are human ways of acting. That is why they are good for us to practice. When we begin to study the virtues, we come to a deeper understanding of ourselves. Hope is a virtue that tells us quite a lot about the basic journey of human life. It is the virtue for the wayfarer. One of my favorite thoughts to think is that there was a time that I did not exist. (I'll give you a moment to silently ponder this simple, but profound reality.) The natural consequence of meditating upon this simple fact in light of another simple fact, that I now exist, leads me to appreciate in the depths of my soul the giftedness of my existence. I exist because another person wanted me to exist and gave me existence; to be more precise I exist because another Person (God) wants me to exist right now. On the natural level, I owe my existence to my parents. But it shouldn't take me long to realize that even on the natural level God is the primary agent who created me from nothing; my parents cooperated with Him. As the book of Wisdom says, "He created all things that they might be" (Wis. 1:14). Josef Pieper's book on hope begins its discussion about the virtue of hope with the existential reality that to be human means that I have a close proximity with nothingness (because I am not the source of my own existence) and simultaneously an orientation toward the fulfillment of existence through becoming the utmost of what I am capable of being. To put it a little more simply, to be human means being a creature that is not yet perfect. This state of being human is traditionally described as a state of being "on the way." One of the ways people have quite naturally expressed this state of journeying as an image for the whole of life is through undertaking pilgrimages. I once walked for eight days through the countryside of Portugal and Spain on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, the resting place of the Apostle James the Lesser. During many moments of the walk I came experienced quite precisely why hope is so important: thoughts and feelings of quitting, of turning aside from the difficult path and wasting my day eating tapas in whatever town through which I happened to be passing was a real option. Relying on myself alone, there was no guarantee of reaching the end. I am too fickle, indecisive, and weak to be that certain of completing the journey. But I also knew that I could make it if I continued putting one foot in front of the other and relied on God. Pilgrimages are difficult journeys undertaken for the sake of reaching a holy destination and leaving behind sinful ways of life. According to that definition, life is a pilgrimage. The beautiful painting by Thomas Cole captures well the reality of hope as the virtue that moves us through the crags and shadows of life as one capable of sinning to the threshold of eternity illumined by the light that comes from the Cross of Christ. Life is a journey, Christ is the guide and goal. Social commentators today lament some of the consequences of living in a culture of instant gratification. I've always mistrusted people who believe that instant gratification is not such a bad thing. These are the people who think that the problem with the world is want. If everyone just had exactly what they wanted all the time, everything would be peachy. Something deep down seems wrong about that opinion. After reading and pondering again about the virtue of hope, it seems to me part of the reason that I believe instant gratification to be so detrimental to the formation of our character is because it eliminates the need for people to learn how to exercise hope; and hope takes seriously the "not yet" of personal fulfillment. According to St. Paul "in hope we are saved" (Rom. 8:24). The corollary to that statement is that without hope we are not saved. The theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity are connected in such a way that the "supernatural life in man has three main currents: the reality of God, which surpasses all natural knowledge, manifests itself to faith. Love affirms - also in its own right -the Highest Good (God), which has become visible beneath the veil of faith. Hope is the confidently patient expectation of eternal beatitude in a contemplative (think beholding by our mind) and comprehensive sharing of the triune life of God; hope expects from God's hand the eternal life that is God himself" (Cajetan, Commentary on II, II, 17, 5; no. 7). What the great Cardinal Cajetan states here about hope is the important fact that the only hope that is perfect and virtuous is hope that comes from God (through faith), depends on God (whose gift of grace sustains us in our life), and reaches out for God as the supreme Good of our lives. Without God there is no hope because ultimately God is object of our hope. One of the earliest prayers that children learn is the Our Father. St. Thomas Aquinas thought that the Our Father was the means through which Jesus taught us to hope in God. In fact, prayer and hope are naturally ordered to each other, so the pedagogy seems sound. We pray in hope, and we express our hope in prayer. Think for a moment of how important it is for children to pray the words "Our Father, Who art in Heaven... give us this day our daily (super-substantial) bread, forgive us our trespasses...deliver us from evil." When it comes right down to it, hope turns our hearts to God in order to receive from his merciful goodness what we need, but cannot grant ourselves. The Our Father, as a prayer of hope, directs us to turn to God because in His Goodness and Omnipotence He alone can bring me safely to the end of my life and provide for my every need on the way. He alone can give me daily heavenly nourishment. He alone can forgive my sins and restore me to divine friendship. He alone can deliver me from evil. It is my desire that the virtue of hope be fostered in our homes and school. We need authentic hope that comes from God and clings to God. Otherwise, the difficulty of the journey of life will be too much for us and our students to bear without turning aside from the path that leads to eternal life. The common proverb states that "hope springs eternal." I think that a better proverb would read "hope springs from the eternal," because God is the source of hope. In conclusion, I'd like to list some simple ways that hope can be fostered in our lives and in our homes:
In Christ, Fr. Nelson LEAD, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home-- Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene—one step enough for me. I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that Thou Shouldst lead me on. I loved to choose and see my path, but now Lead Thou me on! I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, Pride ruled my will: remember not past years. So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still Will lead me on, O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone; And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile. - Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman "Although the Divinely infused light of faith is more powerful than the natural light of reason, nevertheless in our present state we only imperfectly participate in it; and hence it comes to pass that it does not beget in us real vision of those things which it is meant to teach us; such visionbelongs to our eternal home, where we shall perfectly participate in that light, where, in the end, in God's light we shall see light' (Ps. xxxv, 10)." - St. Thomas Aquinas De Veritate Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe." Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." - John, Chapter 20 The first of the virtues that I want to write about is faith. It is one of the virtues that is called "theological" because of its origin and object, which is God himself. What this means is that faith comes from God; it is a grace to have faith. It also means that the object with which faith deals is God in himself, and other things only insofar as they are related to God. That faith is a virtue means that faith changes our psychological power of the intellect to firmly and stably act well in relation to believing what God reveals. The reason that the virtue of faith can do this is because with the infusion of faith into our souls by God's grace we are given a supernatural capacity to relate to God who reveals himself to us in Divine Revelation. The only reason we need faith is because God has spoken to us. But what he has spoken to us through both deeds and words exceeds the capacity of human language to describe perfectly, as well as our natural reason to grasp and hold as it as true. If we are going to deal with God himself, and not just his created effects, there needs to be some proportionality between us and God. This is what is meant by the light of faith. The light of faith surpasses the light of reason as the illuminating capacity of our intellect to grasp an object of knowledge.
Cardinal Newman's moving poetic description of being led by faith beyond what we can immediately see is a good reminder to us that the light of faith doesn't remove all obscurity or need for human trust in life. Rather, faith is shown to be most active precisely when we are led through the obscurity of life with a certainty that does not rest on our own psychological or emotional steam. I've found this to be deeply consoling in my own life, and deeply important at the moments in which believing God and following God in the practical things in life are most closely connected. The light of faith is rather comfortable, or even curious as a concept; it is the only thing you have to hold on to when you are deciding whether or not the Creator of the universe is personally calling you to live your life in a certain way, such as becoming a priest! And yet there is light in the darkness; certainty amidst reasonable doubt. All of this is true because the light of faith is a real supernatural habit of mind, and not just a human attitude. In a very practical way, the episode described in John's gospel between Christ after the Resurrection and the apostle Thomas is instructive to us all. We should expect God to work in ways that are both interior and exterior in our lives. Can the God who has given us our intellect not provide another illumination of that intellect beyond that of natural reason? Can the God who has given us our wills not move them freely from within, so that by his grace we become truly free? What the apostle Thomas saw in the Resurrected Christ is not divinity itself. He did not see the essence of God as we will see God "face to face" in heaven. But in seeing and touching the glorified humanity of Christ, he was given a reason to believe what he could not see or touch. Faith made up the difference. So for those of us who have not seen the risen Christ, God comes to us through the witness of the Church who proclaims the scriptures and celebrates the Sacraments; in the process he turns the lights on from the inside, so to speak, through offering us the gift of faith as a response to the external reasons to believe. Truly blessed are those who have not seen and believe, because our assent of faith rests more solidly on our docility to the Holy Spirit illuminating our minds and moving our wills... but it is not without foundation. This kindly light of God's grace active in faith provides a bedrock for our lives. In the first place because we easily and without error hold what is true when we hold what God reveals. Our understanding of it all requires the use of our minds to seek understanding. We all know that people of faith can misunderstand the implications of what they believe through a faulty use of their reason, and as St. Thomas explains this is also due to the fact that we only imperfectly participate in the light which illumines God to our minds. Yet, despite our imperfect vision of God through the light of faith, it nevertheless provides a compass to point us to the eternal homeland for which we are created. Like pilgrims traveling at night through a foreign land, even the dimmest of lights is a welcome help for in the serious task of finding our position and heading on the map so that we may direct our steps toward our true destination. In summary the virtue of faith is... a grace: it comes from God as an act of his favor to us; a human act: we must cooperate with the grace of God given in us to cling to the truths that he has revealed to us; when we believe, it is truly an act that we do in cooperation with the interior help of the Holy Spirit; ordered to understanding: "What moves us to believe is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: we believe 'because of the authority of God himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived.' So 'that the submission of our faith might nevertheless be in accordance with reason, God willed that external proofs of his Revelation be joined to the internal helps of the Holy Spirit." The the miracles of Christ and the saints, prophecies, the Church's growth and holiness, and her fruitfulness and stability "are the most certain signs of divine Revelation, adapted to the intelligence of all; certain: It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God; completely at peace with science: Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth; free: man's response to God by faith must be free; we are capable of choosing him or denying him; necessary for attaining heaven: According to the Letter to the Hebrews it is impossible to please God without faith. I hope these points help you to understand the basic structure and importance of the first of the theological virtues, faith. The next virtue that I will cover is the second of the theological virtues, hope. Pax, Fr. Nelson |
What I'm currently reading...The Discernment of Spirits by Fr. Timothy Gallagher, OMV Archives
April 2019
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