| | Be Holy Apostles | | Donald DeMarco | | | Sherlock Holmes and his able companion, Watson, were camping one night. About 3 O’clock in the morning, Holmes wakened his partner and commanded him to look up and tell him what he deduced. Watson gazed at the starry skies and began to expatiate on their beauty and supernatural implication. An increasingly exasperated Holmes soon came to the end of his patience and blurted out: “No, you dummy, someone has stolen our tent!”
The obvious is not always so obvious. We cannot see what we cannot see. Optometrists report that a person can become completely blind in one eye without realizing it. One cannot see that he is blind. Such a realization requires insight, or some process of logical deduction. Similarly, a Christian can completely lose his faith without realizing that his faith is no longer there. Like Watson, he cannot see the missing tent and concentrates his attention on something far away. A faithless Christian may become an avid sociologist, but his lack of faith hinders his capacity to bring God into the lives of his brethren.
A great deal of education consists in restating the obvious. Parents should love their children, not merely approve everything they do. Teachers should not flatter their students, but challenge them to test the truth of things. What are the two most obvious “obviosities” that one might restate to a group of seminarians? Quite simply: be holy and be apostles.
1) Be Holy: The tale is told of a Russian rabbi who had the reputation among the people in his village of being so holy that on Fridays he ascended to heaven and spent the weekends with God. A cynical newspaper editor assigned a journalist to stalk the rabbi and dispel this evidently silly superstition. The journalist followed the rabbi the next weekend as he was instructed. He observed one selfless and unceremonious act of charity after another. The young writer was so moved by the rabbi’s obvious holiness and deep care for others that when his editor asked him whether the rabbi indeed ascended to heaven, he replied, “If not higher.” |
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“Holiness” is derived from “wholeness” and simply refers to a fully alive, morally complete human being. Paradoxically, the holy person makes his holiness more obvious the more he tries to conceal it. Holiness does not require fanfare, bells, whistles or media coverage. It is a light that is evident to anyone who can recognize the obvious.
It is better to be whole than to be fragmented. This principle, though obvious, one might say, also needs to be restated. What ballplayer, after hitting the ball into the centre field seats, would be content to stop at first base? After all, he might say, “What’s wrong with a single?” No, one makes the complete circuit. Why would anyone not want to be everything he can be, to be whole and to circle the bases and arrive home? Man fully alive is the glory of God, and his most obvious indication that he is present to us in the world.
The Russian word for chastity, tselomudrie, means “the wisdom of wholeness”. The more whole the person is, the easier and more reasonable is the practice of chastity. If we are whole, we have all that we need. Even Sigmund Freud, not exactly a friend to Christianity, knew something of this principle when he warned people against the “tendency to overestimate the unattained sexual object.” We often idealize what we neither have nor need. What we truly need is what makes us whole and holy. We need God to help us to be all that he wants us to be.
2) Be Apostles: An apostle has something valuable he wants to share with others. His love for others impels him to share his life, the truths, and the goods he has discovered with them. The ancient Greeks had two words for life: bios and zoe. The former refers to biological life, the force that pulsates through any individual organism. But the latter refers to that abundance of life that transcends mere biological life and can be shared with others. The apostle shares God’s life and is eager to share that life with others. ...Contd. | | |
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