Third Sunday After Easter (2020)
“I beseech you, as strangers and pilgrims”
- I Pet 2 - Epistle
Try addressing a group of Catholics today, a fortiori, any group of Americans, as “strangers and pilgrims”. You would be met with accusations of lunacy. Such is the state of Faith’s collapse from which we suffer. Begun in the Renaissance, it reaches its nadir in our own day, and within years to come shall yield a more frightful barbaric world. This is the pandemic that should alarm us.
But strangers? The first Pope’s description of us is stamped with the fire of the Holy Spirit. There can be no doubt as to its veracity. It can only be understood by properly understanding the world in which we find ourselves. It ought to be “strange” to us, not “strange” in the sense of wicked, but “strange” in the sense of foreign, unfamiliar, far beneath our aspirations. Indeed, this world, as lovely as our good God has created it, is not our home, not where we should be, not where we belong. Each of us has been created for joys far deeper, far higher, far more infinite. Chesterton expressed it perfectly: “For the Catholic, it is a fundamental dogma of the Faith, that all human beings without exception whatever, were especially made, were shaped and pointed like shining arrows, for the end of hitting the mark of Beatific bliss.” Though we accept our fate as dwelling in this ‘valley of tears’, it is not the state for which we created. It is ectopic, a disjunction of Original sin.
Yes, this world is indeed “strange”, or should be. It is this mystery to which St. Augustine gives immemorial words on the very first page of the Confessions: “Thou has made our hearts, O God, and our hearts shall not rest till they rest in Thee.” Every good and blessed delight that God showers upon us in this life is only a morsel of what awaits our satisfaction in Heaven. Thus C. S. Lewis’ stunning words, like a golden key, unlocks the mystery:
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it is not in in them, but only comes through them. And what comes through them is longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of the past, are good images of what we really desire, but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself: They are only the scent of the flower we have not found, news from a country we have never yet visited.
So it is that Holy Church begs her children to acts of mortification. To keep our eyes on that which befits our dignity, not on the fleeting flashes of this world’s delights. If not for consistent bodily penance we fall in love with shadows, leaving the glorious Reality behind. So stands the plight of Modern Man – to become infatuated with shadows, which is madness. Chesterton, again: “Catholicism is sanity preached to a planet of lunatics.”
Pilgrims? For poor banished children of Eve, of course. How else to describe our mission in this world? We are on an adventurous search for a perfect happiness not be found here. We are nomads desperately hunting for the ‘pearl of great price’. Pilgrims are on their way to a prized destination. They rest occasionally, but only as a pause as they necessarily make their way forward. St. Thomas rightly defines man as homo viator (man on the way). The journey may be strewn with obstacles, but the pilgrim tackles them, then, moves steadily forward. In W.H. Auden’s poetic words, “stumbling forward, rejoicing.” No room for sentimentality here, only the blazing truth of the Church. There is a place where we must be; no tarrying; no self-pity at setbacks; no falling back due the severities of the climb. Only joy that we are on our way, that God has marked out for us the way, and that His graces guarantee our final arrival home.
Modern Man has made the world, not the place through which we pass, but the place beyond which there is nothing to pass towards. He has buried himself in a tomb of his own doing, and makes merry of his entombment. This single minded immanentism of Modern Man has even migrated into the Church. Rare is the summons from her pulpits of ‘saving one’s soul’, but to ‘saving the environment’. Such sacerdotal myopia does not grasp that the environment is indeed sinfully wasted, but only because man has first wasted his soul. Unusual are the sermons enjoining us to the love of the Cross, instead the cheery duty of assisting others to be at ease with their sins. The Savior bequeathed to His Holy Church only one mission, to carry us to heaven. All other temporal concerns, sub aeternitatis, are only mirages fashioned in the laboratories of Hell.
Peter’s salutation to all of us as “strangers and pilgrims” perfectly embraces our vocation on earth. Unless we work each day to make it our identity, then we shall ever be strangers to Heaven.
April 2020
[ Image credit: Ridgeway Mongwell, oldest known road in Britain - Public Domain ]
