Fulfilling our Vocation - #3

(Read Leviticus, 18, 1-6)

My dear Sisters in Christ,

In our first conference today we tried to discover from the revealed word of God what the vocation of mankind is. Our reason for doing so was very simple, but very basic. The one best qualified to tell us what our vocation is, is our Creator, God Himself. By the time we concluded the conference we had decided that mankind’s vocation is no different from that of any other creature in that he too is supposed to reveal the glory of God. But it is very different in regard to just what aspect of God’s glory man is called upon to reveal. There is no other creature upon earth who can reveal what is most characteristic of God. Only man can reveal that God is love because only man has been given the capacity to love.

Now can we say in all honesty that mankind is fulfilling its vocation to love? I am sure you can all answer that question for yourselves. Can we say that our relatives, our friends and our associates, the people we meet are fulfilling their vocation to glorify God? Can we say that we who know that God is love and have taken vows designed to help us attain the fullness of love, i.e., perfect charity, that we are revealing the love that is in God, that is God? I think that for the most part we must hang our heads in shame and say that we aren’t fulfilling our vocation, not at least as mere human beings. All we can say is that occasionally we meet some people who are sincerely and evidently trying to be loving. But of that group- to which, please God, we long – how small a percentage ever really does achieve the degree of love that fulfills man’s vocation!! How do we know this? Easy! There are so few people we meet whose presence fills us with awe, reverence and praise of God. There are so few people we meet who inspire in us sentiments of gratitude to God and a determination to love Him in return. As a matter of fact, most of the time the complete opposite is true. By our conduct we and others are obscuring the fact of God’s love, and thus we are obscuring the fact of God’s existence. We are obscuring the active presence of God in the midst of mankind. People who hear us affirming our belief in God and in His personal interest in mankind rightly believe that we should be living examples of what God is like. And so we shouldn’t be surprised if they reject the God we believe in. Sometimes we so effectively obscure the fact that God is love that we convince people that there is no God at all. So many people point to evil and misery and suffering of every kind and say: If there really were a God, all this would not be happening. The whole history of mankind is a history of wars, hatreds, cruelties and murders, exploitation of the weak and poor by the rich and powerful. The history of mankind is a long story of people using and abusing their fellow human beings, that is, of man’s inhumanity to man. We can see all too clearly that this is so even in our own day.

Why is all this so? The reason is again to be found in Sacred Scripture. It is found in the opening passages of the book of Genesis, also. There we learn from God, who, because He is our creator and who alone can tell us what is right with mankind, is the only one who can tell us what is wrong with mankind, namely, that something has happened which has so crippled humanity that mankind became incapable of revealing the love that is in God. That tragedy is sin. We learn also that sin, though it must be blamed upon man, was also instigated by a person outside the human race who was able to enter into dialogue with human beings, a cunning person who is our enemy and who hates us, the Devil. Sin and the devil are still with us, as the daily papers unwittingly show, and it is only right and to our advantage to know something about them.

It is not from Genesis that we learn what the devil is like, though we do learn of his existence there. It was Christ who told us about him. The devil is a liar and the father of lies. The devil is the enemy of all that is good. The devil seeks to tear and destroy. He is the personification of cruelty, hatred and all that is evil. He is the enemy of God. As God’s enemy he would destroy God. But not being able to do that, he seeks to destroy the works of God, all those things that reveal the glory of God. In particular, the devil wants to stamp out every trace of love, for it is love that reveals the true character and glory of God. To destroy love is like destroying God because God is love. Anyway, it isn’t surprising that the devil should seek to destroy mankind, for only man, among all God’s creatures could reveal that God is love.

When we turn to the story of man’s sin, we get some idea of what the causes of sin are and also about the effects of sin. We discover some aspects of our status as free, intelligent creatures. When we meditate upon it, we learn from the story of the first sin that sin is possible in that we sense our inadequacy, because we know that we are called to great things. We know that we are called upon to complete ourselves, to continue creation, to perfect God’s handiwork. We sense that the wherewithal to fulfill our vocation and to reveal the love that is in God must come from outside ourselves. We learn from the “temptation-fall” account that two main options lie open to man, that he is confronted with two alternatives, each of which promises to give him the fullness his being cries out for. And so man finds himself in the dangerous situation of being obliged to trust somebody, he has to throw himself into somebody’s arms. He has to take a leap in the dark, believing that the person out there calling for him to jump can really see and will catch him. Having an option is in full accord with the fact that man is free. It is this which makes it possible for man to sin. And so really, it was in making mankind capable of loving that God made man capable of sinning. We wouldn’t be able to love were we not free. And we wouldn’t be able to sin either, were we not free. This fact can be consoling, however. We are often too anxious to free ourselves from the danger of sinning. But we stay away from all situations where sin is possible, and then we are also freeing ourselves from the possibility of loving.

We don’t know exactly what the first sin was all about. All we can say, judging from the symbolic story of the tree of the Knowledge of good and evil, is that God had asked man to trust Him. He had asked man to be subordinate to Himself, the Creator. This subordination was to be an act of love. God told man nothing that would enable him to understand why he should not eat of the fruit of that tree. He didn’t tell man this was a test. Neither did God give man a clear insight into the nature of the penalty, death. In effect, all God was doing was to tell mankind to entrust itself entirely to Him. And this is what they did until a person from the outside, that is, from outside the human race appeared on the scene to tempt Eve (the woman). This last fact, namely, that the extra-humane tempter chose to confront the woman instead of the man seems to be especially significant to me. From my own personal experience I have concluded that women are more psychic than men. This means that they are more susceptible to communications from the world of pure spirits than men are. And also, I believe, they are better able to grasp the spiritual realities behind sense impressions and experiences. You all know how much little signs and symbols, gestures, touches, glances mean to a woman. A woman reads between the lines. And so it was to Eve, that the devil presented himself when he sought to destroy love and rob mankind of its fulfillment, indicating what a powerful impact women have upon morals in society. And the technique the devil used then he continues to use to this day. He appeals to what is deepest and most noble in us. He appeals to our instinct to be our very best selves, and he presents evil to us under the appearances of good. It is to our advantage to know just how it is he operates.

The devil began by suggesting to Eve that she was being deprived of something she had a right to. And what this amounted to was a subtle suggestion on his part that God was not being fair. The devil was, in effect, trying to undermine her confidence in God. As is typical of the devil, he spoke a lie. Eve was quick to respond that the statement of the devil was false, and yet she realized in correcting him that his statement did contain a germ of truth. God had forbidden them to eat the fruit of one tree. But the thought the devil wanted to stick with her actually did. It was the idea that God was acting less than reasonably, that He was in fact depriving them of something they did have a right to. Yet her confidence in God did rally somewhat, she defended God by explaining why the prohibition was necessary. It was necessary in order that they might not die the death. And yet it seems probable that right here, as the words came out of her mouth, Eve must have been aware that she really didn’t know what she was talking about, that is, she had no knowledge from personal experience of what it was to eat the fruit and experience its effects. She was aware that she was accepting God’s word about this unknown thing, death, and that it really would follow from eating the fruit, that it really was a hateful thing. She was aware that she had subordinated herself without question to God, abandoning herself completely into his hands.

And the devil continued to lie to her. He called into question God’s motives. He claimed that God was deliberately keeping them from being like Himself. He was accusing God of being unloving, of not wanting to share. He claimed, instead that eating the fruit would make Eve to be like God. And here again he was insinuating that God was depriving her of something she had a right to. But he did so by appealing to something good in her, namely, her desire to reach the perfection of her being, which in itself, is also the will of God. At this point, finally, Eve abandoned her trust in God. She decided to examine the situation with her own natural faculties and draw her own conclusions. So she looked at the fruit. She perceived with her senses and her intellect that it was a delight to behold and pleasant to the taste. She perceived, really, what the sacred author had said, namely, that all God’s creatures were good in themselves. When she saw that in itself, it was good and harmless, she ate it, and gave it to her husband, who ate it. At this point, let us point out once again the tremendous power a woman is able to exercise over a man. A man is ordinarily a very reasonable, very reflective person. Men are noted for their ability to think things out coolly and rationally. But if he loves a woman deeply enough he will set aside all thinking and take as his motive the gratification of his loved one’s desire. I feel sure this is what happened here. The devil didn’t have to approach to tempt the man. All he had to do was to get the woman to fall, and she brought the man down with her. And when Adam fell, all of his posterity fell.

We will never know exactly what kind of sin they committed. The important elements seem to be two. First, they abandoned their subordination to God and their dependence upon Him, their creator to provide the means they needed to achieve the perfection of their being, deciding instead to seek out their perfection and the fulfillment of their vocations using their own native abilities only, particularly, their own personal conception of what constituted their perfection. Second, they sought to achieve their perfection by assimilating the creatures that were lower on the scale of creation than they were themselves. It seems they thought that, by use and disposition of creatures to build up their own ego’s, with no guidelines from their creator, they would consolidate their hold on life and thus fulfill their vocation.

We don’t know, either how long it took before they realized their mistake. Scripture says their eyes were opened immediately. Then they discovered how lost and helpless they were. They saw they were naked and went into hiding. I think this is a symbolic way of saying that they realized their nothingness, and yet they determined to keep this fact hidden. They had become ashamed of the truth. We continue to do this today. We do not want other people to know what wretches we are. We hide behind a façade. We often do not want to admit to ourselves that we are nothing. We even think we can hide it from God. As a result of their fall, because they believed the devil, Adam and Eve became liars, too. Before their fall they felt no shame. They knew perfectly what they were, that is, as creatures they had nothing that had not been given to them, and that they had done nothing to deserve them. There was another result of their sin: more lies. They tried to claim no guilt; they attempted to shift the blame to others. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. The serpent, of course, had no one to blame. He was probably gloating over his victory.

What follows is the sentence of condemnation. All three were punished. Although God is presented as decreeing the penalty, it is more true to say that the penalties were logical consequences of their ‘declaration of independence’ from God. There was a strict causal relationship between their act of insubordination and all that followed and is described as punishment. And what they did experience was the beginning of death. Just as the word of God inviting man to participate in the goodness and perfections of God had brought order and harmony into being, so also man’s response of ‘no’ to God’s invitation had started all of creation down the path of division and disruption and deterioration. Without God’s help they would revert back to the original state of their component elements: a body taken from the earth and therefore more like to a brute beast, and to a spirit which had now lost its supremacy over the body and became incapable of imposing its spiritual attributes upon the body. In us, body and spirit are at war with one another, each seeking and pursuing its separate ways. Also, man would taste death in that he would find it difficult to subdue the earth. Its savage nature would ever be a hardship for him. The earth would resist yielding up nourishment to him; it would not produce as readily as it ought what he needs for his own well-being. It would be prone to produce what cannot nourish him. And although Scripture does not say it, man would lose dominion over the things that surround him. He would be more affected by his environment than the environment would be affected by him. He would go astray in seeking knowledge. He wouldn’t succeed in knowing things thoroughly enough to name them. Eve would also be a loser. She would lose her quality of equal helpmate to her husband. What was intended to be a great joy for her, childbearing became a source of anguish in body and mind. The devil was also advised of his future. His victory was not to be final. Eventually a woman, like Eve, not subject to his dominion, would do battle with him and would triumph. The man this woman would bring up with her to victory would be the one who would destroy sin, renew all things, restore love, and thus crush the serpent’s head. He would eat dust because he would be forced to suffer humiliation after humiliation, in that rather than destroying love, he had given it greater scope in which to reveal itself and gave place to the possibility of God’s achieving a far greater honor and glory.

And so, sin is a reality in this world. At the present time it exists in the world, but contrary to appearances it does not rule the world. Sin ruled until a new spirit came which is able to overcome the spirit of sin. But because we have not lost our freedom entirely as a result of sin, the spirit, which casts out sin is helpless in any person who does not willingly allow the spirit of sin to be cast out.

How could we describe what sin is? How is it propagated? I think we all know well enough. Sin is a refusal to love, a refusal to give of self, a refusal to build up and perfect through sharing. The spirit of sin is a spirit of self-containment, self-assertion; it is the spirit whereby a person seeks to consolidate and perpetuate himself as an individual rather than to contribute to the building up of the community and the persons in the community. Sin is the spirit, which urges a man to augment himself, add to his substance regardless of the cost, irrespective of the unhappy effects this has in the lives of others. And if he does assist others outside himself, the sin in him prompts this only when this contributes to his own self-affirmation and increase. Allied to this spirit, there is in sin the spirit of self-defense and the spirit of revenge. These are instincts, which reveal how deeply sin is ingrained in us. The instinct to defend himself makes a man fiercely belligerent in protecting his goods. He will not permit them to be taken from him nor diminished. The spirit of self-defense will brook no injury to ego or to stature, or to any benefit one enjoys to the extent of resorting to violence and destruction if that proves necessary.

Scripture tells us that all flesh corrupts its way. And it is this that confirms that sin is ingrained in us all. After the fall, scripture begins to enumerate the murders and the hatreds and the divisions and vices of mankind leading up to Noah and God’s decision to wipe it all away and start anew. But perhaps the best and clearest testimony of the fact of sin and the tenacity of its grip upon us is found in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, 1, 18 – 32, and particularly 7, 14-24. Let us listen to what St. Paul has to say about it:

The Law, of course, as we all know, is spiritual; but I am unspiritual; I have been sold as a slave to sin. I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate. When I act against my own will, that means I have a self that acknowledges that the Law is good, and so the thing behaving in that way is not my self but sin living in me. The fact is, I know of nothing good living in me – living, that is, in my unspiritual self – for though the will to do what is good is in me, the performance is not, with the result that instead of doing the good things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want. When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me. In fact, this seems to be the rule, that every single time I want to do good it is something evil that come to hand. In my inmost self I dearly love God’s law, but I can see that my body follows a different law that battles against the law that my reason dictates. This is what makes me a prisoner of that law of sin which lives inside my body. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body doomed to death?

Sin has obscured the glory of God in us. We do fail to reveal that God is love. And so we are doomed to be colossal failures no matter what we do, unless we are saved from sin, allowing it to be rooted completely out of our nature.

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