« So THAT’S Where She Learned to Hit Like That! | Main | Free of Charge, No Cost: Homily for 3 August, 18th Sunday, Cycle A »
Of Human Life: Homily for 27 July, 17th Sunday, Cycle A
By Fr. Dennis | July 27, 2008
Have you ever found a treasure so beautiful that you would sell everything, sacrifice everything, in order to obtain it? Have you ever found a love so amazing that you would pay any price, travel any distance, brave any danger just for a chance to win such love?
Have you ever felt as Charlie and Craig Reid must have when they wrote:
But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man that walked a thousand
Miles to fall down at your door.
Those of you who are married must have had that experience. And even if married life is rough and shaky at times, you can probably recall that first flutter of excitement when you realized that nothing else mattered. Nothing else in life would be worth much if you couldn’t share it with that person whom you were so grateful to God for having found.
Parents know that feeling too.
My brother says that he didn’t know how much his heart could love until the day he laid eyes on his son for the first time.
Some things, like love, are so beautiful, so amazing, that they change everything. Nothing can ever be the same again.
Here is something that is true. Just as grace builds on nature, so does love beget love.
God, who is love, speaks his Word of love, and all creation comes into being. The exchange of love between the persons of the Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, overflowing out of the heart of God, to create and create and create. And God is still creating because God still loves. To this very day there are new and wondrous creations that come into existence all around us.
Some of these creations we call them “children,” who come into existence in their mothers’ wombs. Children who have never existed before, and yet made with immortal souls that will exist forever, to the praise and glory of God, made to become saints, made to join in company with the angels in their unending song of joy. Children. Created by God from love. Created by love, created out of love, created for love.
Of course, parents have something to do with it as well. Children don’t just pop into existence in a cabbage patch. No, children are the result of an act of love. The intimate act of love, the marital embrace of husband and wife. Whenever a husband and wife embrace in intimate love, they are renewing in their own lives, in their very bodies, the sign of God’s ongoing love for all of us. For the intimate embrace of marriage is a renewal of the very holy Sacrament that binds them together.
And isn’t that amazing? That God would allow us, who are sinful, fallen, creatures, to participate in the Word of love he speaks to the whole world. In the Word of creation that brings new life into existence. New life that is made for glory.
This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of an encyclical letter, a teaching document, by Pope Paul VI with the Latin title “Humanae Vitae,” or in English “Of Human Life.” Many people who have not read this truly beautiful document, are only familiar with its popular criticism.
The release of “Humanae Vitae” in 1968 was much anticipated around the world. Only a few years before, the “pill” was introduced, and was widely being prescribed by doctors as a way to “free” men and women from the responsibilities and dangers of babies and children. It had only been since 1930 that the first Christian denomination, the Anglican and Episcopal churches, had announced that artificial birth control was morally acceptable, and every other Christian denomination in the world swiftly followed suit. Every denomination, that is, except the Catholic Church. And in 1968, observers were sure that the Catholic Church would want to modernize and become relevant to a relativist age.
But “Humanae Vitae” was not the document that these observers had hoped for. Instead of flipping 2000 years of constant Church teaching on its head, it re-asserted the consistent teaching of the Church that the physical intimacy between husband and wife must always be open to the possibility of God’s creative activity. That is, it must always be open to life.
Twenty years ago, when I was a much younger man, long before I thought of entering seminary, and I was keeping all of my options open to see what it was my life would become, I was typical of my peers in thinking that old, celibate men in Rome could not possibly have any idea about the realities of living in the modern world. I believed the hierarchy only wanted to protect their power and enforce their antiquated views on everyone else so that we could all be as miserable as they must surely be. I did not agree with the Church, and I dissented against the Church’s teaching, instead deferring to the ultimate wisdom of my own conscience. Of course, I had never bothered to read any of the Church’s documents. I was content to criticize them without doing the work of reading them.
Then, one day, Mary Pat Van Epps, whom many of you know, asked me to read it. And that’s when I found the pearl of great price. That’s when I found a treasure in a field. Listen to just a few paragraphs of what Paul VI wrote in 1968:
[Married] love is above all fully human, a compound of sense and spirit. It is not, then, merely a question of natural instinct or emotional drive. It is also, and above all, an act of the free will, whose trust is such that it is meant not only to survive the joys and sorrows of daily life, but also to grow, so that husband and wife become in a way one heart and one soul, and together attain their human fulfillment.
It is a love which is total—that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything, allowing no unreasonable exceptions and not thinking solely of their own convenience. Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner’s own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.
Married love is also faithful and exclusive of all other, and this until death. This is how husband and wife understood it on the day on which, fully aware of what they were doing, they freely vowed themselves to one another in marriage. Though this fidelity of husband and wife sometimes presents difficulties, no one has the right to assert that it is impossible; it is, on the contrary, always honorable and meritorious. The example of countless married couples proves not only that fidelity is in accord with the nature of marriage, but also that it is the source of profound and enduring happiness.
Finally, this love is fecund [i.e., open to fertility]. It is not confined wholly to the loving interchange of husband and wife; it also contrives to go beyond this to bring new life into being. “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents’ welfare” (HV #9).
That’s only a part of what Paul VI wrote in “Humanae Vitae.” And it’s truly beautiful, isn’t it? As a reward for such a beautiful teaching, Pope Paul VI suffered much criticism from those who had wanted the Church to change her doctrines.
When I read it for the first time, I saw that the beauty of the Church’s constant teaching on love and life was so apparent, so obvious. I knew that I would sell everything for the truth of it. I gave up my pride. I gave up my dissent. I gave up my rebelliousness. I knew, when I read “Humanae Vitae,” that I had found the truth, buried in a field.
Or rather, I knew that the Truth had found me, buried in a field of my own pride and arrogance.
For when Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matt 13:44) … When Jesus says that, yes, he does mean that we should give up everything to obtain the joys of heaven, which are beyond value.
But the kingdom of heaven is also this: that God so loved the world that he gave up his only Son. God, who discovers us buried in a field of our own guilt and selfishness, gives up everything for our sake.
Husband and wives, following Jesus’ example is not easy. It is the cross. But the cross is the way Jesus loves. It is the way he teaches us to love. If we are to love as Jesus loves, especially in the context of marriage and family, we must insist on a love that is open to life. For Jesus’ love for us is both generous generative. That is, it generates new life. So also must our love be both completely generous and completely generative. It must hold nothing back.
Because brothers and sisters, you are a treasure, which Jesus finds buried in a field, and on the cross and on this very altar, he pours out everything for our sakes. He does not hold anything back. He teaches us how to love by loving us completely. He is the Word made flesh, the Word that was spoken at the beginning of creation, and his Spirit continues to create from love, out of love, by love, for the sake of love.
July 28th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
lovely … really
if others, like you did, make time to read Church documents, a lot of the energies posited in wrong understandings would come crashing to the floor…and there be regenerated, like the phoenix from the ashes, and find a new life in a new love.
lovely…really