Homily

I read an interesting article at the Catholic World Report website this past week. The author explains how the Protestant movement that began about 500 years ago laid a great stress on correct Christian belief, based only on the Bible. The problem was that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and countless other Protestant leaders could not agree on what the Bible actually taught, but each one insisted that their version of Christianity was the correct version. Doctrine, teaching and dogma were the center of Christian life, and orthodox belief was essential. In response to this situation the Catholic Church also began to put an extraordinary amount of importance on having correct belief. But, as it often happens, this super-emphasis on correct belief led to a reaction in the other direction, and many Protestant leaders would begin to emphasize not doctrine, but personal devotion, morality and religious experience. You could, in time, find some Protestant theologians embracing some of the classic heresies, even denying the truth of the Trinity or the divinity of Christ, tossing aside even the basics of Christian belief in favor of the personal experience of religion. The author of this article explains that the Catholic Church held out against this movement to downplay the importance of doctrine until the Second Vatican Council where we begin to see Catholic theologians taking up some of the same ideas and methods of these Protestant teachers—that the heart is more important than the head.

But of course, that’s not true. We need our faith to be grounded in the personal experience of our every day life, let’s say, at the heart. But we also need our hearts to be guided by our heads, to have a correct view of God, His saving work and how and why we ought to live in this world, and the world that is yet to come. Because I think what is happening so often today is not the heart-centered faith that trusts personal religious experience more than the Catechism. I think it goes even further by downgrading the importance of faith itself, in exchange for a world view that is so materialistic that it is difficult for many people even to see the need for God in any real sense.

The word “religion” comes from the Latin and Old French languages meaning “obligation, bond, reverence”—and many people today reject that idea that they ought to be bound to anything or have any obligation to anyone unless they choose to do so. The movement is from strict adherence to correct belief, to placing belief as less important than personal religious experience, to placing personal experience as the only viewpoint that is of any importance. It doesn’t mean you have to be an atheist. You can still believe in God. It’s just that God Himself is not important in how you live your daily lives. Therefore, values and ideals and what is considered right or wrong are not based on any concrete, reliable foundation or understanding of life. It’s all fluid. How do we get from heterosexual marriage to same sex marriage, from the Hippocratic oath doctors used to believe in to euthanasia and infanticide, from understanding that there are two genders, to those who hold that gender is a word that has no meaning—how do we get to all of this in such a very short period of time? Certainly, it’s not because of an emphasis on doctrine, and not even just an emphasis on the personal religious experience of people. It’s an evolution that focuses so much on the importance of the individual that there’s no room left for the Divine. When the head and the heart are not properly balanced, we end up with chaos.

In today’s epistle to the Corinthians we see St. Paul correcting his flock about the balance between what is considered “spiritual” and that which is thought of as “material.” It’s always an area where trouble can come in. Some people believe they are so spiritual that what they do physically does not have any real importance. Some people are so stuck on their physical and material actions that they seem more important than their faith in a saving God. St. Paul warns them that yes, their ties to Christ are ties of faith and life in the Spirit, but that faith is lived by people in the flesh, not just as though we were angels, and he reminds us that our bodies are also tied to Christ, not just our souls. This is why Christ’s rising from the dead is so important, and why our own future resurrections are important as well. We are people of body and soul and we need to keep a proper understanding of both realities so that we may most faithfully live in Christ.

This is a large part of the reason for Lenten fasting. Many times, people see fasting simply as some sort of ascetic practice that is done to deny our flesh by denying flesh, kind of like the Lenten “give-ups” that have become popular in the Western Church. But true fasting is not primarily about giving up food. It’s about changing our perspective so that we can better see how the spiritual and material should work together to form us more perfectly in Christ. When you are hanging a picture on the wall and you’re up close, it can look like the picture is very straight. Then you step back a few feet and you see it is crooked. Fasting is a way to step back a few feet and get a different perspective on our lives. When we combine that with prayer and almsgiving in our Lenten labors, we allow Christ to draw us more closely to Him, as we, the members of Christ’s body, live in Him both our body and soul, as St. Paul teaches. It is true indeed that man needs bread to live, but we do not live by bread alone but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.

So, I want to urge you to consider now, with a few weeks left before we start, what kind of fasting you will choose this Lent in order to grow in Christ. There need be no conflict between heart and head, between body and soul, between the spiritual and the material. Prayer and fasting can grow us up as members of Christ’s body through our efforts and by God’s grace.