The Sign of Contradiction

      A while back, one of the seminarians of our diocese recounted to me an amusing scene he’d witnessed.  He was back in his home parish with a college friend and after Mass one Sunday, introduced his friend to the pastor.  The priest inquired whether the seminarian’s friend was a Catholic, and the young man replied – with that self-congratulatory air of “broad-mindedness”:  “I follow all religions.”  The priest visibly suppressed his temptation to role his eyes and instead smiled and murmured an “Oh.”  Later on, talking to me about it, the seminarian, a rather good logician, complained, “How on earth can one say he follows all religions, when religions so often contradict each other?”  “Well, first of all,” I responded, “if your friend is typical, then he hasn’t much of a clue what any religion teaches.  And secondly, I can assure you that such a man spends very little effort at following any religion.  His ‘religion’ is a non-committal ‘open-mindedness’ to all faiths without the bother of the discipline of any.  He’ll dabble in a religious practice, certainly, until something crosses his own will; then he’ll turn somewhere else in search of a more comfortable answer and way.”  Yoga is really fun until the one practicing it discovers the underlying, metaphysical principle of it:  that all the world of the senses – wine, food, sex, and, yes, even one’s ipod – is an illusion and therefore a distraction from the path of enlightenment.  Real Buddhist detachment then becomes not so attractive. 

      The same phenomenon is to be noted in the modern American approach to Christianity itself.  People look at this faith from the perspective of a shopper:  the world is a large mall full of different stores whose goods appeal to different desires for fulfillment.  The potential church-going Christian then searches for the bill of goods that will satisfy him:  emotional experiences that counter despair, “spiritual” entertainment, a view of the world that provides some sense of a creed that is nevertheless elastic and conveniently changeable, or a “community” of practitioners that wards off loneliness.  Rarely will one stop to think and ask, “Where will I find intact all that Jesus Christ is and taught… even those very difficult and mysterious sayings of His?” 

      Inevitably, if we look at religions and philosophies and their respective founders as though they all are of some equal value, their difference only being located in the preference of the potential devotee (the shopper), then the whole project for the search for truth – so engaging to almost all those who have “founded” a new religion – will come to naught.  Let it be acknowledged that Buddha, Mohammed, Zoroaster, Confucius, Plato and Aristotle sought after the truth, but they would never have admitted that the truth they sought could be contradictory to itself.  Religions, philosophies – as noble as their efforts may be – do not agree on many essential points.  How, then, to do as the young friend of the seminarian claims he is doing:  “I follow all religions” (that is, “I just wander around in the shopping mall, surveying this display of goods, purchasing that artifact or souvenir, and listening to any and all sale’s pitches”)?

      But Buddha and Mohammed, by way of example, were not offering a sale’s pitch; they were offering an explanation of the world, but they really, very nearly, explained the world away:  Buddha, by considering it all an illusion, and Mohammed by declaring that it all depends on the next moment of Allah’s will (whatever that may be).  It is in the Christian story that we find something completely unique:  Christ, the Word of God, entering into the world He had fashioned, a world of sense, rationality, logic, that reflects the fact that it was all made as a sign of who He is. 

      And that uniqueness gets even more intense and particular, and it is illustrated in any number of examples, so obscured by that assumption of modern “comparative religion” that places all religions and their founders on one level.  All are considered more or less as products of their own times, the founders being bound by their own cultural and social assumptions.  This has some truth to it, say, for example, when one notices that Mohammed decreed as from God that a Muslim man can have up to four wives, a decree not surprising in 6^th century Arabia where polygamy was the norm.  But five centuries earlier, Christ had decreed something entirely different about marriage,  something that was as shocking in his own time – even to His own would-be followers – as it is irritating to modern adherents of the sexual revolution:  that divorce, even if reluctantly approved by Moses, is not the will of God, and that a man should leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and that they would become one flesh, the description of life-long, exclusive, faithful monogamy.  And Jesus proclaimed this not as wise advice garnered from social studies, but a revelation from the Creator concerning His plan for His human creatures.

      In like fashion, there was nothing in first century Palestine and in the whole classical world founded on Greece and Rome that can account for Christ’s startling exaltation of the Child.  The Greeks and Romans would have considered a human child as inferior to an adult as an acorn is to an oak tree.  Moderns, in their rebellion against both the one-time sanity of Roman antiquity, Jewish Law and the revelation of Christ, have gone much further in nearly completely disregarding the Child.  These days he has become hardly more than an inconvenience to a liberated lifestyle, so much so that his existence can be thwarted with the Pill or destroyed after conception.  My point might be considered extreme except for the fact that with over fifty million abortions in America since 1973 and artificial estrogen by far the most prescribed chemical by doctors, we are witnessing the strange and sad phenomenon of the extinction of most of the peoples of the developed world.  The Child is now considered acceptable only to the extent that he advances the project of parental self-fulfillment. 

      But our Lord exalted the Child and in doing so was proclaiming something entirely new, something revolutionary to the aging, decadent world of His time on earth.  Unlike the ancient philosophers who considered the world as eternally the way it is; unlike Buddha and the Hindus who consider the world one vast illusion in the way of nirvana; and unlike Mohammed who considered the world as conquerable territory for Islam and ultimately destined for complete destruction – Christ presents to us the Child, who is the sign of His coming to save the world… by starting all over.  And only the childlike, with that accompanying temperament of openness to the wonder of all this – the true wonder and spirit of Christmas – only the childlike will see this and be able to appropriate it:  that God is planning, and has accomplished in Christ, a whole new creation born out of the old, Christ coming to be born a Child in Bethlehem. 

      Here is the uniqueness of Christianity:  that the Creator of all things takes on the very flesh of His created world, the flesh of the Virgin, to be the Child who will renew the created realm from the inside out, from the ground up, from the womb of a woman all the way to the Cross and empty tomb.  Not surprising then that Christ said so bluntly to Nicodemas, “You must be born again.”  You must start all over.  And only the childlike will be ready for such a remedy; only the Child can contemplate such a necessity.  So then, no wonder the norm of baptism in the Church has become the christening of the infant. 

      “I follow all religions” expresses an attitude of all that is un-childlike, first of all because it is not true – and the childlike are known for their honesty – but also because it is a statement unfair to all religions, blithely ignoring their very serious differences, and therefore, obscuring the possibility of there being an answer, a truly satisfying answer, to all their attempts at making sense of the world.  Christianity, the Catholic Faith, does not present itself in the shopping mall of religions as the “best deal”; rather, following the lead of Christ, born in Bethlehem, it proclaims that all the riddles of life with their tentative and often unworkable, unlivable answers, are resolved, answered, satisfied, not in some new, super religion, but by the One, the Child, who has come to fulfill the religious longings of all peoples.  In a real sense, He did not come to found a religion but rather a Church to carry on this message of salvation, the reality that He – and not some new system of “good ideas” – is the Answer.

      No, the world is not an illusion, but it would be easy to think so, given the troubles and evils we all must face.  And no, the world is not eternally just the way it is; rather, in Christ it is able to be redeemed and saved, remade.  No, this world is not the secular battlefield of one religion against another, a struggle to be decided on the basis of worldly power, but rather a created realm that points to its Creator, who has been obscured from the sight of men due to sin and now fully and perfectly revealed in Christ, a claim He Himself made more than once.  With Christianity, what is proclaimed is something totally new, completely undreamed of:  God the Creator Himself, coming in the silence of a winter night through the “yes” of a most noble woman, to bring the light of God’s will, the might of God’s power to save, the love of God to dispel the darkness of a world that had, by the time of Christ’s coming, begun to lose hope of an answer.  Then He came, in the fullness of time, a Child, born of the Virgin, to begin everything all over again, and to restore all things.