Thursday 24 August 2017

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A 2017

The Second Reading, where Paul agonised over his people’s inability to accept Christ, reminds me of the role catechesis plays in the life of the Church. It is safe to say that catechetics is mostly a matter of the head. As Saint Anselm used to say, "Fidei quaerens intellectum". Faith, for it to make sense, must investigate the contents of belief by means of reason in order to acquire a deeper understanding of revelation. If for no other reason, we have to educate the head so that the heart is not misled by superstitions. The natural unity between head and heart, which in a world turned topsy-turvy by sin, has been disrupted. Hence, knowing and loving must be regulated. The head requires systematic training and academics will tell you that it is not easy to sit and struggle with material at hand because our vitiated inclination is readily distracted. The heart also needs coaching because of the damage inflicted by sin, it is inclined to indolence or inertia. The naiveté we suffer is to mistake that head and heart are in harmony meaning that what the head knows, the heart will follow. 

That is not the case as experience will dictate. A good example is what you see in children. They say they understand you but they do not always follow up with what they understand.

We are however, not dealing with children. For myriad reasons, people do leave the Church or if not, they simply become marginalised. Superstition could be one reason. They know little and frequently are incapable of articulating the reason for their belief. In this situation, catechesis does have its job cut out. We need to catechise. It is our first line of defence as Fulton Sheen illustrates with this quote. "There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church--which is of course, quite a different thing".

But, there are people who leave even if they know. As mentioned earlier, the heart does not always follow the head. St Paul himself confirms it in Romans 7:19--The good things I want to do, I never do; the evil things which I do not want--that is what I do. Whilst this may be a perennial human struggle, the point is, when the heart has been bought over, the head will always lose out. It is to this heart that catechesis must turn its attention. 

The truth is, we really do not know how to nourish the hearts. The better question is what the heart would be mesmerised by.

The short answer is beauty. We are adept at teaching truth and goodness but we do not really know how to teach beauty. It is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and therefore it is pretty much subjective. Whereas, truth and goodness are different in the sense that they are more objective. But is it really a case that truth and goodness are objective and beauty is not?

Consider this. All of us want goodness. This is because we are made for the good as nobody knowingly will choose the bad. The same too for truth because each one of us wants to believe in the truth and nobody likes to be lied to. Finally, we all desire to grasp beauty for no one here wants to embrace ugliness. A man never goes out to marry an "ugly" woman.[1] Now, just because I want something, it does not make it good and just because I believe in something, it does not make it true and finally what I grasp as beautiful does not make it a thing of beauty. This shows that beauty does have an objective reality to it.

Now, if it has an objectivity to it, then catechesis can take place. For otherwise, if it were just subjective, then we are all doomed to wander the wilderness of fakes and imitations passing themselves off as beauty.

Now, in the context of catechesis, where do we encounter beauty? Let us begin with our liturgy. In itself it is a wonderful gift of beauty because it is the memorial of the mystery of salvation (CCC1099), that is, if the Church is to be believed. Unfortunately, some of us do not fully accept that. Rather, we have come to believe that the liturgy in itself, even when carried out according to the prescribed rite of the Church, is not enough to secure our salvation. In a sense, we are driven by a Pelagian attempt to secure our own salvation—a forgetfulness that beauty is salvific.

Secondly, look at the state of our church building. The heart is not just mesmerised by beauty. It is also inspired by beauty. But our idea of building beauty is basically a hodge-podge of functionality. It is almost like dedicating a space to the Lord and not having any other functions for it, would rank as a sin against the “Return of Investment”—in other words, beauty is wasteful, irrelevant or mostly extravagant. All space must be useful. And in the absence of architectural beauty, we generally fill the void by dragging the pub into the church—jazzing up the liturgy to make it more “engaging” and less boring. Notice at the same time the same entertainment criterion employed when we cut down on readings fearing that people will be turned away by having one reading too many.

We are so accustomed to the democratisation of beauty[2], meaning that anybody and everybody has a right to his idea of beauty that to suggest pub music as inappropriate would render one an elitist. The reality is, the world has become so accustomed to devouring from the trash of mediocrity that it can no longer stomach the sublimity of beauty and so denigrate the sublime as elitist. Just watch the “Emoji movie”. The idea of beauty is so corrupted that nobody raises an eyebrow that a piece of faeces is actually a character of the movie. We have normalised ugliness.

Beauty has a role in catechesis and is indispensable to the instruction of the faith. In the context of catechesis, the Catechism speaks of beauty, in the context of sacred art, as evoking and glorifying, both in faith and adoration, the transcendent mystery of God. Beauty in sacred art draws man to adoration, to prayer, and to the love of God, Creator and Saviour, the Holy One and Sanctifier” (cf. CCC 2502).

The desire for beauty can be inculcated and whilst there exists a tension between “objective” beauty and also “subjectivity”, we should not be quick to dissolve it.[3] More importantly, the desire for beauty is not fed by facts or information but rather it is strengthened through living experiences. 

Having stripped the altar, is it a wonder why young people know so few saints? We are busy with presenting facts and information of the faith forgetting that both goodness and truth are clothed in the flesh and blood of saints. Many statues inside a church are not an indication that we are idolatrous. Instead, they are our friends in catechesis—as they reveal the beauty of the holiness acting in their lives.

Indeed, beauty is a big-picture undertaking. If we accept the premise that the human spirit has a supernatural aspiration, then it makes sense that the human spirit is more ready to sacrifice itself for an enterprise bigger than merely the “self”. The big picture is provided by the tradition and the saints because nobody would die for factoids or information. The saints, on the other hand, provide concrete proofs of why a person would lay down his or her life the person of Jesus Christ and His Church. Saints are our unbroken link to the reticulum we call Tradition.

In summary, catechesis is also a battle for the hearts and as such it is fought on as much intellectual grounds as it is on emotional grounds. Emotion is nourished by beauty. Unless we begin the rehabilitation of beauty from just personal preferences to that which is of God, we cannot inspire and the faith will remain cold concepts to be endured and not captivating convictions to be embraced.





[1] Even if the woman is “ugly”, it is because the man sees beauty in it. We search for beauty because it is “objective”.
[2] Beauty is a difficult notion to grasp because our taste is based on preference, that is "what I like". St Thomas Aquinas describes three qualities that objectively constitute beauty. He speaks of proportion, integrity and clarity
[3] It is not as if the Church does not take into consideration diversity. She does. In fact, Paul VI said, “Evangelisation loses much of its force and effectiveness if it does not take into consideration the actual people to whom it is addressed, if it does not use their language, signs and symbols, if it does not answer the questions they ask, and if it does not have an impact on their concrete life”. At the same time, he also cautioned, “Evangelisation risks losing its power and disappearing altogether if one empties or adulterates its content under the pretext of translating it” (Evangelii nuntiandi n63§3).