FORMED BY FORGIVENESS

God gives life, forming each person in the womb of one's mother. Each person, however, is born in sin, deformed from the failure of our first father, Adam. Reformed by baptism in the name of the crucified Christ who rose to live again, we can begin to become mature as Christ is formed in us by faithfully following his Way of Truth through life. Moving on in maturity from the experienced love of eros on to the shared love of philos and the learned love of storgos, we die to self to become alive in Christ so that we can love like Christ Himself loved us, fully expressing the love of God in his ultimate act of agape, death on the cross. Secure now in being loved oneself by God, we live by the resurrection power of Christ to love others as we have been loved ourselves. Always intending to act justly, we continually love mercy in imitating the forgiveness of God before whom we humbly walk. Doing the truth in love, we find justice fulfilled in forgiveness.

Each choice we make follows from this absolute commitment to being like Christ, ordering all we do towards God. Every relationship with every person we encounter is an opportunity to make manifest the love of God. Being bound by the bodily reality of concupiscence, we find we fail in our following, our conscience standing as witness to such failure.

Yet God's grace does not fail, being given freely as we repent, renewing our baptismal commitment to be faithful followers of the Way. No longer in hiding because of our failure, we are ready to reveal who we are to others, unashamed of what our lives may show. By God's grace, every aspect of our lives make known to others the loving truth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

FAITHFUL FANTASY: THE CONSCIENCE POLICING THOUGHT

One's conscience judges one's thoughts as well as one's actions. This is why one is morally responsible for one's fantasy. To dwell on impure things is not good. Such is unfaithful fantasy. The faithfully mature person learns to guard one's thoughts, taking care to dismiss rather than entertain impurity. It is the transforming work of God's grace that helps one do this.

THE MYSTERY OF THE PERSON

Here is Karol Woytyla (later John Paul II) in a letter to his friend, the theologian Henri de Lubac, from behind the iron curtain in 1968:

I devote my very rare free moments to a work that is close to my heart and devoted to

the metaphysical sense and mystery of the person.

It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on that level. The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is even more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order. To this disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideologies we must oppose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of “recapitulation” of the inviolable mystery of the person.

COMMUNITY / COMMUNICATION / COMMUNION

Relationship between oneself and another continues in community through communication bonded by communion. Community is composed of persons called together to cooperate in diversely living life in common.

com = with /uni = one

SELF --> OTHER

(We are born into a world of others.)

LOVE =

eros (experienced) -->

philos (shared) -->

storge (learned) -->

agape (expressed)

Living person =

immaturity-->maturity

HOLY SPIRIT (Life [US <--> THEM] Death) HOLY SPIRIT

LOVE / like-----------unlike...dislike / HATE

FREEDOM & TRUTH

Freedom and truth are significantly related. Freedom is the performance of truth. Jesus said, "The truth shall set you free." It is interesting to note how the Greek word translated as "truth" helps us understand something about truth: aletho-, aleth- + "true" "nothing concealed" "real" [from a-, "no, nothing" and letho-, "forgetfullness, oblivion"]

The word for truth, aletheia, is a composite: the prefix a which reverses the meaning of the word to which it is attached; the verb letho, “to cover up,” “to hide,” “to keep matters forgotten.” aletheia literally means “that which reveals what has been hidden or covered up”.

“To live the truth” (cf. Eph 4:25) involves a process of uncovering what has been unclear, hidden or camouflaged. Truth is not always obvious, not always self-evident, not always easy to know. The truth of a particular situation may be obscure. Getting at the truth frequently requires a process of uncovering, of unveiling what has been concealed.

A PASTORAL STRATEGY OF ACCOMPANIMENT

Srodowisko

Karol Wojtyla’s pastoral practice of working with lay people, as priest, bishop and cardinal (and to some extent even as pope), has been described by George Weigel as a "pastoral strategy of accompaniment." Wojtyla’s play, The Jeweler’s Shop, was a partial payment of his debt to what he himself referred to as “my srodowisko,” a Polish word that can be translated as environment or milieu.

Those involved in the srodowisko (many of them married couples with grandchildren, and numbering about 200 Polish lay people by the time Wojtyla, whom they called “Wujek,” meaning “uncle,” became Pope) spent much time together, including holidays skiing, kayaking and hiking. Srodowisko discussions were characterised by friendliness and openness with no subject and no problem being off limits.

Coincidental with the development of the srodowisko was Wojtyla’s continuinually progressing academic career studying and teaching philosophy:“Srodowisko was, in a sense, the empirical tether for Wojtyla’s emerging skill at philosophical reflection.” Crucial in shaping Wojtyla’s ideas and ministry, his srodowisko facilitated a detailed understanding of how ordinary people, trying to be mature Christians, lived their everyday life. One of those people, Stanilslaw Rybicki, recalling the experience of the srodowisko, said of Wojtyla, “He lived our problem. He knew life from this side – the side of people who really have to work for their living.”

Five themes from a student retreat in 1954 suggest ideas that Wojtyla tested with his srodowisko:

1. There is no dividing life up into the serious and the frivolous, the true and the unimportant.

2. Christianity is not for the sacristy and the sanctuary alone nor was it an abstraction.

3. Jesus Christ was not God pretending to be man but the incarnation of God entered fully into the drama of the human condition.

4. Love is not fulfilling oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other and receiving the other as a gift.

5. The lethal paradox of the age is that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.

Wojtyla told his people,

“You are great because you are God’s creation.”

BELIEF SYSTEM

I would like to clarify what I mean by "belief system." It is not necessarily related to "religion" per se. Your belief system is that which determines what you recognize/accept to be true. Your apprehension of all that transpires in your life is filtered through your belief system. You are motivated to take action because you believe such action is necessary, even if you may not be able to articulate why you believe it to be so. Your affective response to events in your life is measured by what you believe. Your concept of truth is essentially a function of your belief system.

You may not be very systematic in articulating what you believe. but you do have some belief system. The way you use language to articulate what you believe may or may not be congruent with how others use similar language. This is why communication is so important in relationships. Knowing what another person believes is not a simple matter. It may be very difficult, if not impossible, to discover what someone believes unless that person chooses to reveal such belief. Even with any revelation of belief comes the need for each person to clarify one's understanding concerning that belief; faulty assumptions lead to misunderstanding that can have quite a negative impact on a relationship.

THEOLOGY IS THE STORY OF GOD

In class we discussed how theology (theo-logia), rather than being some mere "study" of God, is the "story" of God.

God, in giving His Spirit, reveals Himself so that His story can be faithfully told. There is more to this story than any single telling discusses. Although other tellings may be possible - very many more - the whole story rests completely in the mind of God. God become man in Jesus Christ, whose unique life truthfully tells God's gracious story.

One cannot tell what one does not know. No one but God's Spirit knows the mind of God. God is unknowable without the Spirit's anointing, the active presence of God in one's very life. Jesus Christ, full of the Spirit (CHRIST = MESSIAH = ANOINTED ONE), lived his life on earth completely faithful to God, obedient even in death; God raised Jesus from the dead to ascend into heaven in order that the Spirit of God might descend to dwell in the people of God.

To be a Christian is to be one born again in Spirit and Truth, able now to be a faithful witness to God's true story in Christ. Each Christian depends on the Spirit to lead the way of telling the story truthfully. Without the Spirit, one is ignorant and the telling becomes less than true.

In the beginning was the Word/LOGOS, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1).

Our story must be told with more than merely persuasive words of wisdom. What we proclaim ought to be true a demonstration of spirit and power. Our faith rests not on human wisdom but on the power of God. "What eye has not seen and ear has not heard and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love Him, this God has revealed to us through the Spirit" (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:2-16).

Writing along the Way

This blog considers ethics as an expression of faithfully following the way of Jesus Christ. I have just begun another semester teaching a course in Christian Ethics at Immaculata University. My intention in keeping this blog was to post as content that which I found of interest in class discussion. Perhaps this semester I'll actually keep the blog up to date.