Homily

St. Paul warns the people in Galatia not to follow the ideas of certain people in that community who wanted to force some of the Law of Moses onto Christian converts. He writes, “They want you to be circumcised only that they may boast about your bodily observance. May I never boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

To be thoughtful, to spend some time considering a Gospel parable like the one we just heard, or a news item, or a political election, or what my life means in this world and looking for light and truth—this is not the way our society seems to be heading. And if we talk about being thoughtful and looking for truth and light in the teachings of Christ, this is definitely not where our society is heading. The ultimate cause of this is pride. The ultimate result can be eternal loss.

Pride is at the very root of our modern problem. That is nothing new in human history, but I think it is the amount of pride in our country today that creates bigger problems. If my life is all about me, centered on me, attentive to me, my thoughts, my will, my desires, my rules, my existence as the center of my universe—it surely follows that God becomes just another object in my universe, one more thing to deal with, or not deal with. It is not necessary to openly oppose God. It is not necessary to deny God. All it takes is to put yourself in the center, and then, as the serpent told Eve in the garden, you yourself will know what is good and what is bad. You won’t need God to tell you. And ever since the day Adam and Eve decided that the snake might be right after all, Satan’s job became a whole lot easier.

Pride is an easy master. It does not require us to denounce God. All we need to do is put ourselves first, and then we can sort out where we want to put God. Pride does not force us to hate or attack others. All we need to do is put ourselves first and then we can decide what we want to do about other people. Pride does not force us to follow in this direction or that one, follow these rules, or those rules. That doesn’t matter to pride, as long as you are at the center of your universe you can decide for yourself. Pride doesn’t even care if you believe in God and pray to Him, as long as when it gets down to the nitty gritty and you have to take a stand, that you put yourself first.

Over these past decades the Gospel of Pride has been ever more loudly proclaimed and ever more warmly embraced, and it has accomplished changes in our culture that few people would ever have foreseen coming 50 years ago. People look but do not see, hear but not understand. How do you get people to believe that divorce is good for children, that sex outside of marriage is not only good but even the most normal of all activities? How do you get people to accept that you can have a marriage between two people of the same sex, and that marriage is not a commitment that lasts for a whole lifetime?

How do you convince people that vulgarity, pornography, lying and shoplifting are always bad behaviors? How is it possible for people to take the lives of other people, or even the life they have growing within them and see it as not only permissible but even as their right? How is it possible that people can say that the killing of an unborn child is a part of “health care?” The number of Catholic people who believe this is shocking. 48% of people who call themselves Catholic believe that abortion should be legal in all, or most cases. This goes directly against the 2,000 year old teaching of Christ’s Church, so how does it happen that people now totally disregard this moral law? It is pride. And pride is the most powerful weapon of Satan.

Some people say that we can’t get in the way of the rights of other people. We can’t tell other people what to do, even though, all the time, they are telling us what we need to do. But what do we know? For the first time in human history we cannot even know if someone is a man or a woman unless they tell us.

I think we are stuck in a gradually increasing and unwavering grip of cultural pride. Our culture of pride. How does cultural pride come about? Bit by bit, person by person, the individual pride of each person contributes to the whole. Pride is as easy as falling off a ladder, but that doesn’t make falling off a ladder a good thing. Pride says if you don’t give me what I want you are against me. But humility teaches that if I don’t give you the truth I don’t care about you.

That is what we need. We need to counter pride with humility. Christian humility means that I know my place—my place with God, my place with my neighbor. God has placed me at the center of His attention and when I live in that understanding no self-importance I can manufacture for myself will ever give me any lasting satisfaction. And if God tells me to love my neighbor as myself, then in humility I accept His command and I strive to do His will, not my own will. Being louder, angrier, and more abusive will not dampen cultural pride of our society. But living in humility is the only effective way to protect ourselves from its toxic effects, and maybe also encourage others to do the same.

St Paul said in today’s epistle that he only glories in the cross of Christ Jesus, which is the perfect symbol of humility. Every time we make that sign of the cross this morning may it serve as a call for us to seek humility, not because we are lowly and unworthy servants (although we are) but because our glory is indeed only in Christ, not in ourselves. Only in that glory can we become our best selves, and grow in a genuine humility which counters the pride and foolishness of the society we live in, as we serve as an example to others of a wiser and more human way to live in this world.