 Well, it's a delight this afternoon to be able to speak with you about something that I think is very much something that I think I've encountered a lot in my life is people who find themselves put off by religion, by organized religion, as sometimes people put it, or by the church that, you know, people, if the church, you know, they don't know much about the church, but they know something about Galileo, the Inquisition, and the Crusades. I used to have a friend who called it the CIG history. That's all they know. But, and somehow the church is awful in these elements and probably not true and not complex, but it is a way in which, you know, the human side of the church. I sometimes, I don't need big things like that. I can just find, you know, like parking is enough to annoy me, you know, or again, you know, a church's policy about, you know, wearing masks enough to get my eye or up. I don't need big problems. But in a way, it's like this face of the church that kind of seems annoying. It seems maybe arbitrary. How do we somehow learn to recognize that in that is somehow where God is coming to meet me? The short answer for today is that we want to not be spiritual but not religious, but become spiritual and religious. And we have to rediscover the virtue of religion. And before we get into the specifics, I want to highlight in a way we have to also recognize, right, you know, the atheist is never wholly wrong. Aristotle will say that no opinion is so wrong that it doesn't have an element of truth to it, right. There is something about the world that is a mess. And there's something about the church that's a mess. There's something about the 12 apostles that are kind of scandalous that one of them betrayed Jesus and one of them denied Jesus. Why would I want to follow a Jesus who had such apostles or listened to such apostles? There's a profound mystery at the heart of the Christian faith, which is that human beings are both the receptacle of divine revelation, the means of communicating divine revelation and the divine revelation is that we are utterly incapable of either generating or on our own even communicating divine revelation properly, right. It's the mystery of grace. So we really do want to then pay attention to a certain sense in which spirituality and religion are renewed. They are rebirthed in Christ. Okay, so I want to highlight four different spiritual but not religious mentalities. And the first one is what I call the Burger King way, right. Have it your way. I was on article, by the way, I was doing a little work on this spiritual but not religious. And one of the things that somebody describes is that they like to think about, you know, spirituality as the Burger King way, right. Everybody gets to do it their way. Whatever works for you, sounds good. Interestingly, in doing a little work on this, I found out that Burger King in 2014 thought this was or they eventually ended up switching it to you rule. And then in 2014, they tried to come up with a different one, which is be your way. Anyway, they had some marketing people from Brazil that thought this would be cooler. Well, but it's interesting, have it your way, be your way, you rule, right. This in a way is, so to speak, somehow it seems freeing at first. You don't have to do what other people tell you to do. There's a strange thing, if you have children or teach schools or different things like that, or just of course have been a human being with perhaps other people who tell you what to do, you know, like the first thing when anybody tells you something to do, your first thought is no, right. Nobody likes to be told what to do. So in some ways, well, wouldn't it make sense that in that, which is most important to us, we could just figure it out for ourselves? It's kind of silly, but on the other hand, it's maybe close, you know, we want this somehow. Another approach that I read in Huffington Post, just I figure a good place to find some kooky ideas, is she wrote this, I don't need to define myself to any community by putting myself in a box labeled Catholic, Baptist, or Muslim. When I die, I believe all my accounting will be done to God. And that when I enter the eternal realm, I will not walk through a door with a label on it. It's an interesting line here, of course, because you may have that echo, I'll look at it later on John 10, when Jesus says I am the door, which is kind of interesting, which is kind of fun, by the way, maybe we need a door, right, if we want to go somewhere. But but there's something in this, which is also again, I think a kind of popular idea that, you know, even if there is a God, God surely has to be greater than the human labels of God. There's that story of the elephant who comes into the room with the six wise men and one touches the trunk and thinks he's a rope, one thinks touches the side and thinks he's a wall, one touches his ears and thinks he's a sail, one touches, you know, the different parts of them and kind of like this is just all religions are trying to find the elephant. And again, there's there's an element of truth to that. There are a lot of religions in the world and a lot of them are pretty incomplete. Of course, you also have to deal with the reality that there's a strange one religion who says that there's a man who says I am the elephant. Right? Well, that's a historical fact. And he says, I rose from the dead. So we got a weird elephant. The elephant came, lived among us and was killed and then rose again. I also want to suggest there's something about this idea, though, that's worse than it sounds at first. Because although it somewhat sounds okay to say God is more than individual human religions and philosophical traditions. In the classical world, let's just say you're a Viking, by the way, you know, the Vikings didn't think of themselves as not participating in something real. Classical spiritual traditions were were real. People believed them. And just consider in a way kind of the modern individualism that separates us from one another and the chronological snobbery as C.S. Lewis called it, that separates us from everything in the past. Everybody in the past is naive, but we somehow are the pinnacle of wisdom. Right? Forgetting, of course, that other generations may look at us and think that we're naive. So when somebody has this attitude of, oh, that's just another human label for God, in a way, they're kind of cutting themselves off from everything else. So just imagine what would have been like to men of Viking and to live under this prayer, this funeral prayer, lo there do I see my father, lo there do I see my mother, my sister, my brothers, lo there do I see the line of my people back to the beginning, lo do they call me, they did me to take, they bid me to take my place among them in the hallowed halls of Valhalla, where the brave shall live forever. You can live and you can die with such a religion. It might be false, but you can live and die with it, you can organize a culture around it, you can raise children in it, you can, you can suffer with it, because you believe if you suffer bravely, you will join the halls of Valhalla. If we go back, right, how do I, if I believe that God is somehow more than every religion, then in a way, God is also kind of an empty thing. How do I live my life and organize my life around that? I end up being somewhat alone. Again, it sounds freeing at first, but it ends up leaving me again alone. So a third SBNR is what I would call non spiritual, non religious spirituality or philosophy. And this is my attempt to say, maybe there's some people who say this, and they really are on a path of seeking wisdom. Owen Barfield wrote to C.S. Lewis when he was a student before his conversion, philosophy was not a subject to Socrates, but a way. The ancients didn't study philosophy in class, because they wanted to be an engineering student, and they had to take some humanities classes, right, they became a philosopher, because they dedicated their life to wisdom. And interestingly, in the Greco-Roman world, a lot that you had, they would still practice the pagan cults of the sacrifices to the many gods, but they used philosophy to discover the true God. Plato's apology of Socrates at the very end, when Socrates is going to die, the Athenian courts are basically putting him to death. He says, I go to die and you go to, or sorry, yeah, I go to die and you go to live. Which of us goes to the better is known only to the God, hafeos, the God, not the gods. So philosophy in a way was a spiritual way of stepping outside of the pagan religions of the day. It's interesting that in a way, Plato and Aristotle and Socrates and a few others kind of came close to a notion of the creator, the God, so much so that the fathers of the church would occasionally suggest that Socrates had encountered Moses, because they thought that was the only way that you could discover the creator. And I think we can see this again, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, the Stoics, there's a kind of path of wisdom here that's not explicitly religious, it's philosophical, it's spiritual, it's discovering this. You can even see some of this in Confucius's analytics, analytics, Buddhism, 12 step recovery programs. You'll occasionally run into this as well. And in part, I would even say if you're familiar with Boethius is the consolation of philosophy. He knows the consolation of Christ, but he wants to discover the consolation of philosophy. What can philosophy tell us? So if these have meaning, or can help us somewhat, it's because they learn to discipline the ego and grow in virtue. We're going to see, of course, there's still not going to be enough, right? St. Augustine in his Confessions says that the Platonists helped him discover that God was immaterial, and that his soul was immaterial. So that God was not just, as he put it before, he used to think about God as a big kind of ocean, and then as a physical ocean, and the earth floating in it kind of like a sponge. But that would of course mean as he puts it that bigger things would have more God in them, which is kind of absurd. And how do you get evil? So he had to discover things from the Platonists. But he said this, he said the Platonists could see the homeland with God, but they couldn't see the way. Because the way was the incarnation, the humility of Jesus on his incarnation and his death on the cross. Okay, so that's just at least another way that we can consider spiritual but not religious. And a fourth way is Jesus is greater than religion. There's this guy, Jefferson Bethke, he had a poem that he wrapped somewhat on YouTube. It had like 6 million views in 48 hours. And I think it has over 30 million views now. It's about it's like 2014. Why I hate religion, but love Jesus. It's kind of a good, just simple evangelical, non-denominational Protestant idea. Back to the point, one thing is vital to mention how Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrums. See one's the work of God, but one's a man made invention. See one is the cure, the others the infection. See because religion says do, Jesus says done, religion says slave, Jesus says son, religious puts you in bondage while Jesus sets you free, religion makes you blind, but Jesus makes you see. So for religion, no, I hate it. In fact, I literally resent it because when Jesus said it is finished, I believe he meant it. Anyway, you can listen to the whole thing if you want. But the basic idea here is people that do see not only the way to wisdom, but actually see Jesus, but think that Jesus frees them from all religion. Right. Jesus says done. So therefore, I don't have to do anything. All religious acts of worship, religious sacraments, all of these are ways of kind of confusing or taking away from the mystery of Jesus. So I think this is another element and I think in a way if you pay if you're kind of like interested in the history of the development of philosophy and theology, you can kind of see in part the Reformation distrusts works. It's faith versus works, but the works that it distrusts are not fundamentally good works. They're fundamentally the works of the sacraments. It's really a rejection of the sacraments as meaningful ways of encountering Jesus. You only encounter in Jesus through the internal act of faith, not through the acts of worship, at least in the kind of in its kind of purest form as in some ways as Luther articulates it. And the thing in part that kind of sets up the later modes of spiritual but not religious. Carl Adam, who somebody we're going to look at here at one time, he says the basically the 16th century tries to have Christ without the church. The 17th and 18th centuries try to have God without Christ. And the 19th and 20th centuries try to have man without God. Right? It's a progressive diminution of life. And of course, he says the beauty of Catholicism, it's an affirmation of everything. Because you get man, God, Christ and the church, you get it all. Okay, so if those are four different objections, how do we begin to try to think through this more clearly? And in part, when I was starting to work on this, I remember being a student Notre Dame. I think it was like in the late 90s. Actually, one of the fun things I did while I was a graduate student Notre Dame is I was the first person to get Scott Han to come speak at Notre Dame. And the way I did it is the theology department wouldn't support it. I'm sorry to say the campus ministry department wouldn't support it. But I found I had a friend who was an engineer, and he had a chair and he had money. So he was the one who brought in Scott Han. It was great. We packed 400 people in this room in a big room. It was it was and he was exciting. And also kind of the sign of sometimes my political poor skills. But anyway, it was beginning of a wonderful friendship. But I also remember that same year, Cardinal Rinze from Africa, who was the prefect for the Congregation to Divine Worship, or he became that a little bit afterwards, he came and he packed we had like 800 people. And I remember he was up on stage in a big auditorium. And there were undergraduates sitting all around him about 100 on stage. And I remember him saying this exact point. Religion is a normal dimension of human earthly existence. If you're not religious, you're abnormal. To be human is to be religious, not just homo sapiens, but homo adorans. We are adoring people. Religion is not optional. It's not marginal. It's not additional. It's essential. A person without religion should fundamentally be pitied because that person is like a person on a journey. And when you ask him, where are you going? He says, Oh, I never thought of it. Right? How sad. It gives a sense of direction to our lives and a sense of meaning and synthesis of all the mosaics that make the beautiful piece that is life on earth. And again, if we think about what's happening in terms of the West in terms of the culture, this broad pandemic of depression, anxiety, rage, suicidality. Well, we don't have a sense of the direction or meaning or synthesis. There's no peace because there's no peace other than what we make. So religion is normal. And we just have to kind of get that back in our heads. John Courtney Murray wrote a book called The Problem of God. And in there, it's interesting, he gave those in the 40s at Yale University. They invited him as a Jesuit priest to give a lecture series at Yale universities. Those were the days. And he said, based on the problem of God is this. If God exists, then the most important thing is to worship him, and that's going to be central to any society. And if God does not exist, then any claims to worship them are fraudulent, which means then the society's going to have to prohibit the worship of God. We have this illusion that we can somehow step back. And kind of like we can ignore the question of God, but he says, based on the problem of God is a problem that never goes away. We could also look at as we're going to, is the idea is that once we stop worshiping God, we just go back to worshiping things much, much less worthy. Okay, religion then as God, but another way of considering God is good orderly direction. God is more than that, but Aquinas will actually talk about the idea that to be God is fundamentally to be provident. When people talk about God, they always think about something that is overseeing good orderly direction. So when we get rid of religion, we lose good orderly direction. See as Lewis in mere Christianity, he says theology is like a map. Of course here we have the map of Narnia, it's hard to get to. But if you want to get around, he says that in some ways our religious experiences in a way are more important than theology. But he says, wait a second, remember, maps come from experiences of other people, lots of people, and often people that are better than you, wiser than you. So theology is a collection of all the religious experiences of other people. It's the religious experience of Moses, of Isaiah, Paul, Jesus, Mary. She treasured these things and kept them. That's what we get when we study theology. We get not just my own experience, but others. He also says a map is necessary to go anywhere. If you simply want to remain spiritual and relax and stop obsessing, that's wonderful. All of us would do better to take 10 minutes a day breathing. That would be probably good for all of us. But what about if we want to go somewhere in a way the doctrines of religion help us to figure out how to do that? Now, I want to highlight something that's a little bit more problematic, which is what is our way? Have it your way. I just get three examples here of kind of horrific things about human history. In 2015, they discovered in the Aztecs temples that they, Aztecs constructed the temple itself out of human skulls, of those that they sacrificed. They would take all the sacrifice skulls, they would put a bar through them, I think through the temples, and then they would fill in with this. This is a scale of human sacrifice only, you know, 500, 600 years ago. The interesting thing is that this is what, sorry, I forget the name of the explorer Cortez. Cortez wrote that they were horrific human sacrifices, but basically the historians have always discounted that because they thought Cortez was just trying to, you know, use it for propaganda purposes. But it turns out archaeology has proved it right. I'm not saying Cortez was necessarily on the side of the angels, I don't know. But I do know that, like, this is what human beings do to each other from time to time. There's a problem here. We look at the shoes of victims exterminated at Auschwitz, hills and hills of cheap shoes. They have hills and hills of pictures that you can see of glasses. The order and efficiency of Auschwitz is scary, right? They used IBM machines to track because you couldn't keep track of the killings by just paper and pencil, right? Horrific scale. And remember that the Germans were the most advanced culture on the planet. All the most advanced universities, the advanced science, the advanced music, the best music, the best science came out of Germany. And then we also have here, right, abortions talking about, right, breaking apart a body of a human being inside a womb. This is, these are kind of our things. Now, you might say kind of like, well, I'm not, I'm certainly not Hitler. I'm not performing an abortion. I'm not, you know, a German. So I'm safe from evil. Well, in Tolkien's work, it's interesting. He creates, he kind of recreates a world that imitates our world. And so when he creates the elves, well, how do you get the elves that are good, that are in dialogue with the Valar and dialogue in a way with the Yuvatar, with God, how do they go bad? Well, Feanor the elf, who eventually ends up becoming the Kinslayer, strangely, like Cain. We never become sympathetic with Cain because we just think Cain's a jerk because we don't know him very long. But the story of Cain and Abel is meant to say we're Cain. That's what I do. And that's what Jesus says is if you are mad at your brother, you're Cain. But anyway, so when Tolkien does this, he gives two reasons why Feanor becomes this, he sows discord. First is he makes the Silmaril, which are beautiful, so beautiful they have the light themselves of the created lights of the universe and then the two trees that have it, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life, the imaging that that are in the Silmarils and because he's created them, he possesses them and he won't give them up to the Valar. Our possessions possess us and when they do, we begin to create, we separate from God. But that's not quite enough to explain the horror, right? How do you explain the horror? Well, turns out there's an evil lord, an evil Valar, an evil dark prince like our Satan named Melkor and Melkor at one point kills Finway, Feanor's father, right? How do avenge evil without becoming evil? Well, Feanor swears an oath that he will and he has all his sons swearing an oath. They end up renaming Melkor Morgoth. His assistant becomes Sauron who is famous in the Lord of the Rings. But I want us just to pause on this when Tolkien's trying to come up with the nature of evil, he goes to the idea of vengeance. Now, I just ask you for a moment, right? Think about what you might do or what people might do if, say, a loved one were harmed. And I mean harmed significantly by a person who had no respect for that person. You know, maybe a granddaughter was harmed by, you know, somebody and in just unspeakable ways. And you had the power to do whatever you wanted. What would you do? How would you set the scales of justice right? What kind of, what kind of tortures would not be appropriate, right? You know, it's very hard to figure out how do we respond to evil. And I think we often forget that because we just tend to abstract ourselves from it. We think we're kind of safe and protected. But we can't. It's because evil is there that evil sends for the discordant note. It gets into our hearts. And so we will perpetuate the cycle of evil. It's why even the law of the old covenant, when it says you will only take an eye for an eye, is an act of mercy and justice. Because if somebody takes an eye for my kid, I'm not just going to take an eye, right? If somebody, you see it in the Old Testament one time, sometimes like there's a rape of a sister and they go and they kill, they slaughter the, all the men in the nearby village. That's kind of seems almost appropriate. I mean, you know, it's what do you do? This is, I guess what it says, we really have to put ourselves in this situation in which we, we have to give up the illusion if only I had all the power in the world, I would, I would use it well. So we get to this idea, have it your way. What is our way? Lewis in the Great Divorce says there are in the end two kinds of people. Those who say to God, I will be done. And those to whom God says, I will be done. That's it. The question is, what is our will? C.S. Lewis in the Magician's Nephew writes this, length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and she begins to know it already. All get what they want. They do not always like it. One of the problems with the spiritual but not religious attitude is that it doesn't take seriously the problem of our will. The problem of evil across human history. Chesterton would say that original sin is the only doctrine that's empirically verifiable. In every age people do it but it's also strange. In our age people do not believe it. I don't, you know, that having rejected the good news of the incarnation they've rejected what the catechism calls the opposite side of original sin. They tend to believe that if only, you know, we could change the environment we could start fresh and we could create a utopia on earth. I think it's somewhat hard to believe in God that God is going to establish a utopia in heaven but the fact that human beings and a government would establish a utopia on earth, like, that definitely takes faith. Okay so the first idea is that religion then becomes this good orderly direction and we have to get a way out of ourselves. Our egos edged God out of the picture. We, in a certain sense, edged everyone out of the picture. We see the world through our own elements. And you can think of simply as, like, you know, stub your toe. When you stub your toe it really hurts. It hurts a lot and when other people stub their toe it, yeah, it kind of hurts. Like, I'm aware they stub their toe. I'm sorry for them but when I stub my toe it's like my whole world is filled with my pain. Right? I'm sorry for others when they experience loss absolutely but it doesn't fill my soul in the same way that my loss does unless somehow they're connected to me and I receive it as my own. So my ego tends to edge God, edge reality out of the picture just as a little anecdote. I have a student who is a youth minister in an area in Florida and one of her favorite lines was a line I don't even remember saying as a teacher which is always kind of interesting. The things you work so hard at aren't remembered and the things that you forget about are the things that make a difference. But she just said one time I was we were talking about something and I said this, you know, mass isn't about you, mass is about God. And it's like that's why we tend to go I'm not getting anything out of mass or again well because we want mass to be about us. And if you've ever sat through a bad homily or you've ever sat through kind of peculiar architecture or peculiar following of rubrics just remember Jesus has sat through more bad homilies than you have. Right? Jesus has been present in more bad architecturally designed churches into the tabernacle than you have. He's been present at more questionably you know so just kind of like just be grateful but but you know like we we have to remember this is not about us and and always be grateful that we have the created every mass so we know we know the full faith is confessed. So I want to begin then to think kind of like not only because of this ego we end up with a false image of God. Rather than us recognizing who God is and therefore becoming like him in uh Jeff Caven's beautiful way of talking about how God is holy so we should be holy God how does God act we should imitate him. We do the exact opposite we who become unholy who become prideful envious gluttonous devouring we become fearful turned in on ourselves we then think about God in our image. Freud wasn't totally wrong when he said religion is not a is basically man creating God in his own image. Freud was wrong in saying that's all it is and it's always that but it is often the case that that's what human beings do. Human beings that are wicked and cruel perhaps a culture that's wicked and cruel will create a God that is wicked and cruel. Scripture portrays the tragic consequences of this first disobedience original sin. Adam and Eve immediately lose the grace of original holiness and we it's not so much that then they become bad it's that they become blind. They no longer see the dignity of each other and they no longer see the glory of God. They become afraid of the God of whom they have conceived a distorted image that of a God jealous of his prerogatives. We no longer think God is trustworthy. That's why Adam and Eve don't immediately repent throw themselves at the mercy of God. They lie the serpent or you know they the serpent whom you know tricked me the woman you gave me right. She you know they don't even take responsibility. So fundamentally what's at the heart in a way of we have false images of God. So wisdom and discovering God. I want to talk a little bit about the book of wisdom as kind of a key insight here and if we go to wisdom three fifth five it says this from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their creator. So even though we have a false image of God because of our distorted wills we still should be able to reason from the beauty of created things to the beauty of the creator. You may be familiar also in Romans 120 ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature namely his eternal power and deity has been clearly perceived in the light in the things that have been made so they are without excuse. We could come to know that God exists and is the creator and is good and wise but we don't. We don't recognize what is do him. And so here when we get to the order and disorder we kind of see the universe the physical universe and again we just want to step back and say wait a second there is an intelligible order in the physical universe that's non-material because I can think about the entire universe but in a strange way the universe is not thinking about me. I can think about stars that are you know millions of light years away but those stars are not thinking about me. So there is not only order in the universe but there is my capacity to understand the order of the universe. This shows in a way that God must be a mind he must be intelligence. Einstein would come up with that idea where he said the most unintelligible thing about the universe is that it is intelligible. And he would say therefore there has to be a mind behind the universe. Psalm 19 summarizes it very easily the heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament declares his handy work. Now another way is to think then about the moral order of the universe. Nietzsche says this as long as there is grammar then God is not fully dead. By the way this could be a bad sign for our culture as grammar is quickly going out the window and anyway so we may be finally excising God's remembrance from our culture. But Aquinas when he comments on Aristotle's politics you don't we don't need to go through all this but I think at the principles in his room he says animals yell at each other to express emotions of anger fear desire but human beings have words they speak in order to reference things. And so here he says we have language we communicate with one another regarding the just and the unjust the useful and the harmful. Human beings naturally talk as soon as kids start talking they start talking about that's not fair. We don't introduce that to them they intuitively have a moral order that's revealed through language and it's interesting he'll go on to then say that's why man is naturally a domestic and a political animal. He naturally doesn't live alone but he lives in families and in communities. It's not the Lockean individual and this is what language so language itself is revelatory of a moral order. It's interesting and if you've ever read the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis the animals that speak aren't just kind of like they don't have artificial intelligence they have moral intelligence. Now wisdom though says that this is not only that we can come to know the truth about God but that we also fall into idolatry. All men who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature they were unable from the good things that are seen to know him who exists nor did they recognize the craftsman while paying heed to his works. It's very interesting because this is very much like our age. Stephen Barr who's a Catholic physicist and writes a lot on theology and science says we are so good especially in modern physics that looks at what is in front of our eyes that we forget what what is behind our eyes. Right we are so focused on looking at the world we forget that we are looking at the world and that we come from something that is not in the world and that we come from a craftsman right who made us and then wisdom 14 27 says this the worship of idols is the beginning and cause of every evil I'll just get it all up there oops I gotta go back okay there it is of course you may know 1st Timothy 6 says the love of money is the root of all evils and I think Paul is right but I think somehow if you go back to wisdom it's even more powerful the worship of idols is the beginning and cause and aim of every evil well what does it mean to talk about the worship of idols and so I want to put before you kind of a little bit of an image maybe even share a little bit of my own story and I have permission by the way from my loved ones to share some of the story but we gotta think idols are not I don't know how to put it it's not like sticking a snake up on a wall and then all falling down and worshiping or putting a golden calf up here and worshiping it we worship idols because they do one of two things they protect us from what we fear or they promise to give us what we want so they fulfill our desires and they safeguard us from fear and I would just ask you to think a little bit about that I don't know how many people in this room would raise their hands if I said you know like if you could put your hand into a machine and it would give your body every physical pleasure that you could have would you really want to do it you know you know but what if I could put something you could put your hand into a machine and it would like if ever you died you could die without pain you know the fear of pain the fear of dying is a much more motivating factor than the desire for pleasure Aquinas will say actually that we need the virtue of courage more than the virtue of temperance because fear of suffering and death turns us away from God more than the desire for pleasure and we know how much the desire for pleasure turns us away from God so when we get to see us Lewis he in his weight of glory this is a sermon where he talks about he has this quote where he says he says like basically God does not find our desires too large but too small we are half-hearted creatures fooling about with sex money and ambition when infinite joy is offered like an ignorant child playing in the mud in the slums who doesn't understand the offer of a vacation at sea right we are far too easily pleased we want earthly glories that we focus on and we forget divine glory that's promised to us and what he mentions are these three things he says the problem is the good things of this earth when they are mistaken for the thing itself God they turn into dumb idols breaking the hearts of their worshipers it could be music it could be nostalgia it could be that memory of the perfect family it could be that desire for the perfect family and he says he actually at one point says are do you think i'm trying to weave a spell perhaps i am but remember your fairy tales spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them and you and i have need of the greatest or strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for almost a hundred years almost our whole education has been directed to silencing the shy inner persistent voice almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth so what's the enchantment of worldliness it's that the good of man is to be found on earth now these are real goods could be the good of curing cancer i don't know you know all these different elements so let's um let's go on a little bit to try to explore this idea and i want to suggest the beauty of created things wisdom 13 three says if through delight of the beauty of created things men assumed them to be gods let them know how much better than these is the lord for the author of beauty created them so i include my own picture since i have permission and um this is one of my granddaughters six month old lily and grace um right i don't really want to worship a golden calf but it's pretty easy to worship a grandkids um right and maybe to worship yourself and trying to help them and help your kids help them and all these different elements so i think when we think about idols we got to think about things we actually like find those things you like find those things of which you are afraid find those things of which you resent and those might be your idols not saying we shouldn't love our grandkids okay right um but we just got to take them in elements so the beauty of created things but again i think that's what makes the that's what makes them capable of being idolatrous and part of the whole reason why we're doing this is we want to remember is that we are trapped in false religions that's why we need the new religion of jesus we're trapped in false spiritualities that's why we need it so we need to diagnose false religion false spiritualities so just a quick thing here here's a picture of this is uh my wife and i when we were first married with our first two kids um you know like we're trying to do things for good we're trying to do things for jesus um so but we're also building a family well it's complicated right are your children yours or are the gods well both um but there's also a way and you can begin to think about and at least i feel like i began to think at certain times as though my family was my family it was my job to ensure that my children turn out well that my children practice the faith that my children obey the commandments that my children don't end up like other people's children right that doesn't seem that hard um it's and it's like 80 of your real job but you learn out it's actually not your whole job your job is not to make sure that your children don't get sick or don't get cancer or don't get depression or don't struggle with drugs and alcohol or don't get divorced those are not your job we are not in charge of the results and outcomes of life but you can easily fall into the trap of feeling like it and this is just my own story so i think a a priest might tell a story of falling into wanting to like become responsible for the parish you know a sister might feel responsible for the monastery right a single person might feel responsible for the youth ministry or or whatever it is um but we have to reckon that can also become an idol it can become a projection of my ego i used to think when i was younger that when things got bad and you know we had five miscarriages and my wife was sick for many years i used to think that i would put my family on my back and i would carry them and that's so close to the truth but it's also so delusional you know i can wear the sport coat very nicely but it's not a cape i am not superman and i had to at a certain point take off my cape you know and if ever any of you have ever felt like you felt like you wish you had a cape or should have had a cape or were shamed because you weren't able to kind of save everyone else around you you know that shame comes from the devil that accuses us satan is the great accuser and the holy spirit is the great advocate um so and here's a picture of my um son and i have had permission to share this story uh this is my wife and um you know he over the last five years he had multiple suicide attempts he struggled with depression he struggled with drugs and alcohol for today praise god he's alive and sober it's two years um but you know i went through things that i had no idea and i know at first i felt responsible but now i look back and i realized that was this that was the religion of my ego that was the religion of my ego because i can never raise i can't raise people from the dead i can't raise people from depression i can't raise people i just can't raise people what i can do is i can love them and i can accept them and i can also you know you can have healthy boundaries and all these other different elements that's uh that's another talk but i just want to say that sometimes the idols where they we like it's the the thorns of the cares of this life and the anxiety over rich rich riches usually that's not getting the Ferrari but it might be how do i like leave a legacy for my kids right how do i deal with whether or not my kids go to mass can i still be happy at mass if my kids are not there well i better be able to say yes i better be able to say i can love Jesus and rejoice in Jesus whether or not my loved ones i love him Aquinas does say by the way at one point where he says moderate sorrow is the mark of a conditioned mind so being a little bit sorrowful at the evils of this world my own and yours and others is also appropriate but we have to find a way to have joy so again i want to set up this ideals idols as desiring goods and fearing evils and a lot of us are focusing on earthly goods earthly peace consumerism and debt material comfort and gratification sexual freedom sexual exploitation bodily pleasure and domination bodily health and euthanasia extended life without pain and suffering it's interesting you know right now we have a pandemic of suicidality among young people and old people and we also of course have a rise in euthanasia both among old people and younger people this is a this is a large element addictions manufactured spiritual experiences numbing pain family we can view our children as possessions worldly success trying to cure cancer by the way beautiful prayer that a friend of mine taught me was lord before they were mine they were yours and i put them back in your hands and i think you can say that for children grandchildren but also for friends parents for for everyone so christianity then becomes a way out of idolatry that's the key point that's what we need jk chesterton in the everlasting man describes the creed as a key and i want to mention the three things that a key does it has a definite and hard shape if it's a morpheus it doesn't open the key if it gets worn down it's not going to open the door it has an arbitrary historically given shape a shape that could not be reduced from reason sometimes when i teach us to students they get annoyed that i say it's arbitrary but what i mean by that is we couldn't reason our way to the crucifixion we have to reason from the crucifixion we couldn't reason our way to the incarnation we reason from it you couldn't reason your way to the mass you reason from it even in our creed we say weird things like suffered under punches pilot well it's kind of arbitrary that he was working that day right i mean but but that's we accept it but the key thing about a key is that it opens the door and chesterton says it matters what kind where you think you are if you're in a prison and somebody offers you a key you're excited right but if you think you're home and somebody offers you a key you don't care and in a way that's the modern world is we think that the good of man is to be found in this world so we have no desire to go anywhere else and i want to suggest that the easiest creed is simply jesus is lord it's in first grintians romans 10 and philippians 2 jesus is lord and when i say jesus is lord i am rejecting the claim of the romans that caesar is lord which was said at that time and i am rejecting my own claim to being lord myself it's a surrender of pride because i am admitting that i am not lord none of us of course probably run around thinking we're god but we do run around kind of probably criticizing the world and giving god a lot of comments for how he could be running the world better right it's like it's one of the jobs from which i had to resign was you know trying to run the universe uh it's partly why jesus says right my yoke is easy i'm gonna show this in a minute my burden is light it's because our yoke is heavy when we put the weight of the world on our shoulders but jesus doesn't even carry his own weight he just carries the weight from the father and so we then carry his weight and we can become freed okay so true religion then is the way back to god religion is part of the virtue of justice the settled and reliable disposition by which we give to each his due with our heads and our hearts right justice is when you get extra money at the cash register you give it back because it's not yours it's not even really hard it's settled and reliable um but what do we owe god and i think we can think about three things honor right not unto us oh lord not unto us but under your name give it be the glory right just that simple either i'm the center of my honor and glory or god is contrition have mercy on me oh god according to your steadfast love against you you alone have i sinned a broken and contrite heart oh god you will not spurn and then thanksgiving chester would actually say that it's um uh thanks gratitude basically is uh the kind of key to the christian life and gratitude by the way in greek is eucharist us right the eucharist thanksgiving i will offer to the the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the lord we can't thank god if we don't think he rescued us from a prison and ultimately what i realized is the prison from which he rescued me was my own delusional ego yes also from the devil yes also from the culture but specifically from my own ego now i want to suggest in this next part so that's the first part is really focusing on kind of idolatry and the way we get trapped in false religions now i want to look at how god reveals to us his true face and he reveals that his greatest attribute is mercy st john fischer who was martyred along with john with thomas more wrote this god has shown to us christian people the treasures of his great mercy the secret mysteries of the faith and the sacraments of health by which we may trust indeed to have forgiveness we have lived so long in a christian post christian world that we think the universe will forgive us that i mean the universe is a wonderful place and we ought to have a sense of awe and wonder and we ought to try to live in accord with the universe but the universe is not a very forgiving place you screw up in nature and you die right that's just it like nature is actually a pretty dangerous place if you live in florida you have more of a sense of that because there's in any if the body of water is more than 15 feet across there's a gator in it so that's what jesus does is he we discover god's great mercy and the faith and sacraments of the church the religion of the church allows us to get forgiveness what do i want in my deepest spirituality to have peace how do i find it through religion but not through any religion through the religion of christianity so when we think about god unveiling his true face i want to i'm gonna just go ahead and put all these out for us revelation is an unveiling an apocalypsus now in hosea he goes and you may know the story of hosea he uh hosea has to marry a prostitute so he knows what it's like to be god and be married to an adulterous uh you know people um but even with that after his wife is like she's a prostitute who goes back to being a prostitute he says in that day call her back and she says he says he says in that day says the lord you will call me my husband and no longer will you call me my ba'al now ba'al is both the one of the gods they worshiped and it's also the term that was used for husbands in the middle east and in the ancient near east uh they were ba'als and that's why you worship them because you worshiped kind of the sign of like we worship dwayne the rock johnson or something you know like you worship the archetypal male who is strong and fertile so you are but in we forget that the revelation of genesis is the idea that man and woman shall become one there's a reciprocity between man and woman bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh there's a fundamental equality between man and woman the woman is not um you know it's not another property in the way but there's a covenantal relationship so god says i will not be your master your ba'al i will be your husband i will enter the covenant with you that i revealed to you in genesis one and two between adam and eve isaia 54 your maker is your husband for the lord has called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit hosea 214 says god will speak tenderly to us god will take us it's like you're going to go on a marriage retreat where um your mean husband's going to take you and speak tenderly to you but it's actually not your husband's fault you've been awful spouse right you know that's what god says to us so this is he's letting us know he's a loving forgiving husband we're broken but he wants to take us into the wilderness and speak tenderly to us that's his true face so i want to look at moses how do we discover the face of mercy it's actually interesting this was um i'm going to put all up here because scott mentioned this as well exodus 34 moses says i want to see your face he says you can't see my face and live but he passes him by it's interesting that same word passing by is what jesus does in the when he walks on the water and he was going to pass them by he was going to show him that he was god but this is what he says when he passed by and this is right in the heart of the exodus is the heart of the old testament this is why we are not marcians the god of the old testament is the god of the new i am a lord grace god grace sorry god merciful and gracious slow to anger abounding and steadfast love and faithfulness steadfast love is hesed ellios in the greek merciful keeping steadfast love for thousands forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin that who is god god is merciful and gracious and bounding how many he's just like they're 10 of them phrases put together that's who god is but it will by no means clear the guilty so doesn't god's also just god's not just going to say ah it's all fine don't worry about it you can be you know you can go to heaven and be awful no justice matters uh how do we see this in isaiah he says this in isaiah 55 seek the lord where he may be found call on him where he is near let the wicked forsake his way the unrighteous man his thoughts let him return to the lord that he may have mercy on him and to our god for he will abundantly pardon again who is god god is the one who will have mercy let's look at the next part for my thoughts are not your thoughts nor my ways your ways says the lord for as the heavens are higher than the earth's or my ways higher than your ways my thoughts are higher than your thoughts we can reason to god's order we can reason to god's intelligence we can reason to god's justice we cannot reason to god's mercy it is above us it is only there by revelation right for as the snow and the rain come down from the heavens my word shall goes forth from my mouth it will not return to me empty when god sends his word into the world it will accomplish the mercy that he is promising so this is one of the biggest problems with the kind of spiritual but not religious position is that we need a god of mercy but we only get mercy through religion we only get mercy through the revelation of Jesus Christ and you'll notice as our culture becomes increasingly post-christian it becomes increasingly less merciful if you did something wrong you get canceled if you did something wrong 30 years ago you get canceled there's no forgiveness anymore they might you might not sin they might say well that's not a sin but if it is a sin watch out right because mercy is a christian thing begun promised in the old testament so this is just Psalm 103 beautiful psalm as far as the east is from the west so far as he remove our transgressions from us again 103-8 the Lord is merciful and gracious slow to anger and abounding said fast love sometimes people say what's the name of god in the old testament well yes it's i am yes it's the god of Abraham Isaac and jake up but it's also the Lord is merciful and gracious slow to anger abounding instead fast love that's his name for as high as the heavens are above the earth so great so again as a father pities his children this is what's promised and revealed now when god comes to dwell in the temple he tells Solomon and Solomon prayers praise this prayer in both first kings and in second chronicles basically god can't dwell on earth the heavens and the highest heaven can't contain me how much less than this house but nonetheless my name will be in this house my name is in this house so religion can hold the name of god even though god transcends the world and then notice what what comes up further in this what does what's promised in second chronicles and in first grant first kings eight if they repent with all their mind with all their heart and the land of their captivity and pray towards the land which you gave them and to the house in which i build my name then hear from your heaven your dwelling place their prayer and their pleas and forgive your people who have sinned against you what's the point of god dwelling in the temple so he may forgive us so we may know the name to call upon him that's the purpose of the old testament is so we may know the name of god who dwells in the temple and so find forgiveness so then in jesus christ we have um uh in matthew i'm not gonna go through all this but the basic idea he says that i you thank you father lord of heaven you've revealed this what was revealed that no one knows the son except the father and no one knows the father except the son and anyone to whom the son chooses to reveal him the fundamental revelation of the new testament is the revelation of jesus as the son and of god as the father so from the old testament we discover that god is merciful in the new testament we discover that god is merciful by being father and by being son his eternal love of the holy trinity right we can never come by reason to do that i think a lot of people will say oh you can't reason to the trinity but they don't realize you can't reason to the mercy right mercy has to be revealed and so does the trinity um again when jesus asks who do you say that i am well you are the christ the son of the living god flesh and blood cannot reveal this to you but my father who is in heaven so when god reveals himself as father he is revealing the way in which he will go about bringing about the mercy that he promised in the old testament through the mission of his son and then so through jesus christ we then have access in one spirit through the father so there's the revelation of the trinity um we also talk about the idea that in first second peter one four we become sharers in the divine nature we even have um galatians where we become children of god but i want to move ahead a little bit um to this question about then again so now if jesus is the son that is revealed who is he and here's a beautiful little this is from the catacomb in roam the third round the third century and it's an image of jesus the shepherd carrying the sheep jesus is the shepherd by the way yes peter is the shepherd yes the bishops are the shepherd but it's always christ who is shepherding us and we have this in john one or john ten right i am the door i am the good shepherd pope benedict and space alvi will say that jesus is the best shepherd because if you remember from psalm 23 where we say the lord is my shepherd we say right even though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death i fear no evil for you are with me well when i walk through the valley of the shadow of death now i know that jesus is shepherding me through it because he walked through the valley of the shadow of death as shali shadow of death as well so then jesus is unique because he is the door and the shepherd he is the lord so if we go here we go to something new about jesus we have new religion new spirituality the image on the icon up on top is of jesus as the eternal word measuring out creation he is the creator the creative word the word through whom all things are created and then the other one is the word that becomes incarnate it's interesting in this little icon the panto couture half of jesus's face is perfect and looks divine and the other half looks kind of human and a little bit crooked it's kind of interesting trying to show the two sides of jesus's face but if you go to isaaf 43 behold i am doing a new thing something new is happening in jesus we have a new religion a new spirituality in acts 4 12 there is salvation in no one else for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we may be saved remember the importance of the name that dwelt in the temple well now we have the name that dwells in the new testament temple which is jesus christ jesus christ becomes the true name so it is true if any other human name tries to claim to be god we would say that's not true it's only kind of pointing at god but now we have a name that truly is god roman's eight one if the spirit of him who raised jesus from the dead now dwells in you so jesus's name is a new religion and now we have a new spirituality because we have the spirit that dwells in us so what i want to suggest in a way that we don't jesus does not establish another religion or another spirituality we have a new religion and a new spirituality all other as fulton sheen would say are man's search for god but only in christianity and infert or earlier in judeism do you have god's search for man so without christ there's no catholicism but also without catholicism there's no christ um c.s louis in the last battle says that the inside is bigger than the outside right inside catholicism is the whole universe inside christ is the creator that's the mystery magnatius of antioch by the way um he's the first one to call the church catholic and he says right wherever the bishop is and wherever the eucharist is there is the catholic church let's remember that means the universal church so now we have a religion that's not particular we have a religion that's universal it's never been seen before it's also interesting and it's in the same antioch which is where the christians are where they're first called christians so the first place they're called christians is also the first place they're called catholics so in closing i just want to highlight a couple key themes kind of quickly because i'm running a little bit out of time but what i want to suggest is that carl adam and his spirit of catholicism says that basically the idea is that there's no religionless christianity from the very beginning in second temple judaism you have religion jesus you have religion the early catholic early catholics you have religion you always have religion and that means you have dogmatic specifications moral specifications liturgical right no one can say jesus the lord except for the spirit when god is adjoined let no man run to sunder what i received i handed on to you that on the night he was betrayed he took bread how to worship how to believe how to live this is what christianity tells us to do but christ then becomes the center of that because if christ is the true center true self of the church it also means that the dogma of the church will make no sense if we don't see it as christ reaching us through the dogma the morals and the liturgy of the church only have their definitive meaning and life giving because christ comes to us through there um so Aquinas by the way will describe this through the language of the new law and i want to just highlight this idea that he says that the new law which is the law of the new covenant is first and he's the christ is the teacher of the new law the new law is from romans eight the law of the spirit of life law lex covenant all these elements but first it is primarily the grace of the holy spirit dwelling in us it's unwritten and in that sense i'm gonna say there christ perfects all human spirituality you want spirituality have the holy spirit dwell in your hearts that's bigger than any religion so to speak but Aquinas also says it's not only the holy spirit dwelling in our hearts it's also the instructions on how to receive and use this grace written scriptures creates sacraments in the moral life so Aquinas shows us how to be spiritual and religious because both are in christ christ sends the holy spirit into our hearts and he also directs us on how to receive that grace live in it and stay in it um i wanted to highlight just a briefly um the notion how mercy changes vengeance i mentioned the bad elves feanor who by this love of trying to avenge his father creates discord on middle earth well it's interesting that at one time Frodo says it's a pity bill bow didn't kill golem when he had the chance Gandalf says this pity it's a pity that it's pity that stayed bill bow's hand many that live deserve death some that die deserve life can you give it to them Frodo do not be too eager to deal out death and judgment even the very wise cannot see all ends my heart tells me that golem has some part to play in it for good or evil before this is over the pity of bill bow may rule the fate of many if you know the story eventually Frodo gets to the edge and can't throw the ring in but golem actually bites off his finger and falls in and puts it in bill bow eventually shows pity Frodo shows pity and even samwise towards the end shows pity so this pity that begins in christ that is revealed in christ shapes the way we then act towards others and to ourselves i want to close with this last we'll see if i can do this i'm a little bit over time but i think they'll let me uh so i want to look at seeking the god of mercy we want to see god's face i want you to think for a moment to pray Psalm 42 like a jew without the messiah coming we long for flowing stream so my soul longs for thee oh god my soul thirsts for god for the living god when shall i come and behold the face of god why are you cast down oh my soul why are you disquieted within me hope and god i shall again praise him there's a deep sense of longing for god of wanting to see the face of god but knowing that we don't but we will hope but it's long and it's tired so i want to then consider how we can pray that same psalm in the new testament finding not seeking the god of mercy but having found him so i want to suggest in a way that christ frees us from being trapped within the idolatry of the worship of the good things of this world and the worship of our own ego in christ and the religion that christ establishes he reveals god as mercy and christ perfects that mercy he perfects spirituality and religion by carrying it out and the joy that we can experience by having seen the face of god and jesus christ the joy of that music right of palestrina that's the deepest spirituality that we can have when we enter into the religion that's established by jesus christ by which he alone offers to god what is do him which is infinite charity and so seeks to replicate it in us so with that i just want to thank you all for being attentive and i'd be happy to chat with you afterwards thank you very much