The phrase Godless
world is popular with some presidential candidates. In recent months it has
also occasionally appeared in Catholic publications and catalogs. Catholics are
mistaken to use the phrase or others like it.
Catholics believe in the Incarnation
and the Redemption. God, through God’s creation and through Christ’s death and
resurrection, is already in our holy world. Encounter with God for a Catholic is
thus normally mediated through the world. Catholics experience grace (God’s
love) through family, neighbors, co-workers and others. Catholics meet God in
the sacraments; the little sacraments of daily life and the liturgical
sacraments.
Most Catholics most of the time do
not claim a so-called direct or individual relationship with God. The
relationship is mediated. God’s love and God’s truth come by way of the world;
by way of discovery in the classroom or the lab, inside the ups and downs of
home life, through art, music or literature, through conversations and action
on the job, through stories about one’s grandparents, and through the worldly
accomplishments and setbacks of predecessors in the faith.
God’s grace is normally not loud or
bright or immediately evident. That is why Catholics are given, as it were,
special analogical eyeglasses and special analogical earphones to see and to
hear from God who is disguised in ordinary circumstances. This is the function
of the marvelous Catholic sacramental imagination. The Eucharist, to give one
basic Catholic example, reveals God magnificently. But God comes disguised or
concealed as a flat wafer (“work of human hands”) or a droplet of wine (“fruit
of the vine and work of human hands”). God makes use of flawed worldly things (wheat,
grapes) and people (bakers, vintners, fellow worshipers) to stay connected with
God’s analogues, with all of us who are created “in God’s image and likeness.”
Because the world both exposes the
love of God and conceals the greatness of God, Catholics need to meditate daily
or at least weekly on one’s comings-and-goings. Catholics need to recall the
details of the day and week to appreciate that God is constantly lurking about
the world—the workplace, the home, the neighborhood. Aware or not, appreciative or not, we never
have a moment when God is absent from the world. It is wrong to presume that the
world is Godless and that we somehow have to restore God to any alley, any
medical complex, any union hall, any media hub, any trading floor, any park or
museum, any airport or loading dock. God is already there. The world cannot be
Godless.
Of course there is sin. Of course
there are features or overtones of modern life that warrant Catholic criticism.
Of course Catholicism, indeed Christianity, is counter-cultural. But it is also
and mostly culture affirming.
Any strategy related to the phrase Godless world assaults God’s gifts of
reason and science, God’s gift of nature and beauty, and particularly God’s
living Incarnation in the world. Likewise Catholics should use the phrase culture of death and other negatives sparingly
and with plenty of context.
For Catholics, the world is basically
good through flawed by sin. The world is the place of encounter with God. The
world needs healing and merciful kindness, yes. But God’s plan for the world
does not need condemnation from self-serving and self-appointed messengers of
God.
Droel
edits a newsletter on faith and work. It is free from NCL (PO Box 291102,
Chicago, IL 60629)
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