Faithful Citizenship in Pa's 1st Congressional District and the Central Garden State: EPILOGUE: God’s countercultural message about marriage for our authentic happiness!

Sunday, May 25, 2014

EPILOGUE: God’s countercultural message about marriage for our authentic happiness!

John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is really Christ’s “Good News”, applied to marriage, family, and human sexuality. Christ’s “Good News” is not just “Nice News”, implying that it might be superfluous. Jesus Christ alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Christ’s “Good News” is “Fantastic, Great, Indescribable News” – absolutely essential for our earthly happiness and our eternal salvation. Was this meant to be forgotten with JP II's passing? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Despite what the media may try to imply, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have continued JP II's message:

Pope Benedict XVI's Deus Caritas Est, December 25, 2005:

“‘love’ has become one of the most frequently used and misused of words…. Amid this multiplicity of meanings, however, one in particular stands out: love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness....

“An intoxicated and undisciplined eros…is not an ascent in ‘ecstasy’ towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man. Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns….

“Should he aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness….

“Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed. Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure ‘sex’, has become a commodity, a mere ‘thing’ to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity….Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility….

“How might love be experienced so that it can fully realize its human and divine promise? Here we can find a first, important indication in the Song of Songs….According to the interpretation generally held today, the poems contained in this book were originally love-songs, perhaps intended for a Jewish wedding feast and meant to exalt conjugal love….

“It is part of love's growth towards higher levels and inward purification that it now seeks to become definitive, and it does so in a twofold sense: both in the sense of exclusivity (this particular person alone) and in the sense of being ‘for ever’….love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed ‘ecstasy’, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God….

“one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow (cf. Jn 7:37-38). Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God (cf. Jn 19:34)….

“eros is somehow rooted in man's very nature; Adam is a seeker, who ‘abandons his mother and father’ in order to find woman; only together do the two represent complete humanity and become ‘one flesh’ ….From the standpoint of creation, eros directs man towards marriage, to a bond which is unique and definitive; thus, and only thus, does it fulfil its deepest purpose. Corresponding to the image of a monotheistic God is monogamous marriage. Marriage based on exclusive and definitive love becomes the icon of the relationship between God and his people and vice versa….This close connection between eros and marriage in the Bible has practically no equivalent in extra-biblical literature….

“The imagery of marriage between God and Israel is now realized in a way previously inconceivable: it had meant standing in God's presence, but now it becomes union with God through sharing in Jesus' self-gift, sharing in his body and blood….

“this sacramental ‘mysticism’ is social in character, for in sacramental communion I become one with the Lord, like all the other communicants….Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself….

“The transition which he makes from the Law and the Prophets to the twofold commandment of love of God and of neighbour, and his grounding the whole life of faith on this central precept, is not simply a matter of morality—something that could exist apart from and alongside faith in Christ and its sacramental re-actualization. Faith, worship and ethos are interwoven as a single reality which takes shape in our encounter with God's agape….‘Worship’ itself, Eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented. Conversely, as we shall have to consider in greater detail below, the ‘commandment’ of love is only possible because it is more than a requirement. Love can be ‘commanded’ because it has first been given….

“love of neighbour is a path that leads to the encounter with God,…closing our eyes to our neighbour also blinds us to God….

“God does not demand of us a feeling which we ourselves are incapable of producing. He loves us, he makes us see and experience his love, and since he has ‘loved us first’, love can also blossom as a response within us.

“In the gradual unfolding of this encounter, it is clearly revealed that love is not merely a sentiment….

“Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well….The saints—consider the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta—constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbour from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter acquired its real- ism and depth in their service to others. Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a ‘commandment’ imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love. Love is ‘divine’ because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a ‘we; which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15:28)….

“Love of neighbour, grounded in the love of God, is first and foremost a responsibility for each individual member of the faithful, but it is also a responsibility for the entire ecclesial community at every level……..

“Since the nineteenth century, an objection has been raised to the Church's charitable activity, subsequently developed with particular insistence by Marxism: the poor, it is claimed, do not need charity but justice…. It is true that the pursuit of justice must be a fundamental norm of the State and that the aim of a just social order is to guarantee to each person, according to the principle of subsidiarity, his share of the community's goods….

“It must be admitted that the Church's leadership was slow to realize that the issue of the just structuring of society needed to be approached in a new way….Catholic social teaching thus gradually developed, and has now found a comprehensive presentation in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church published in 2004….Marxism had seen world revolution and its preliminaries as the panacea for the social problem….This illusion has vanished….

“The direct duty to work for a just ordering of society…is proper to the lay faithful….

“The Church can never be exempted from practising charity as an organized activity of believers, and on the other hand, there will never be a situation where the charity of each individual Christian is unnecessary, because in addition to justice man needs, and will always need, love….

“a living relationship with Christ is decisive if we are to keep on the right path, without falling into an arrogant contempt for man, something not only unconstructive but actually destructive, or surrendering to a resignation which would prevent us from being guided by love in the service of others. Prayer, as a means of drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently needed. People who pray are not wasting their time, even though the situation appears desperate and seems to call for action alone”