March 28, 2004

To approach Holy Week is to approach the core of reality and, as T.S Eliot starkly put it, "Humankind cannot stand very much reality." The incarnation of Christ, by which the divine Second Person of the Holy Trinity also became a real man, contradicts the mood of oriental religions that seek to escape the body. In a problematic world, the limited human intellect prefers excarnation to incarnation. Incarnation makes solemn and magnificent moral demands on the realist. The tragedy of the human condition is its failure to be really real. Holiness is the realization of what we are supposed to be. It does not happen by overcoming the body; it happens by overcoming the ego. This is the "one-ness with God" intended by Christ in his agony in the garden: "And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are one” (John 17:11).

People focused on themselves seek therapy instead of salvation. Religion, or its substitutes in the form of pop psychology and narcissistic culture, is to them just an emotional attempt to re-design nature to fits one's illusions. Therapy replaces grace and the selfishness inverts natural law. When this infects Catholics, self-absorption replaces the worship of God and Catholic Light becomes Catholic-Lite. As the writer David Brooks puts it, "Here, sins are not washed away. Instead, hurt is washed away. The language of good and evil is replaced by the language of trauma and recovery. There is no vice and virtue, no moral framework to locate the individual within the cosmic infinity of the universe. Instead there are just the right emotions — Do you feel good about yourself? — buttressed by an endless string of vague bromides about how special each person is, and how much we are all mystically connected in the flowing river of life."

His rhetoric about an infinite universe is imprecise, for the universe is a creature and therefore finite, but he hits precisely on the condition that H. Richard Niebuhr detected in the Liberal Protestantism of the 1930s: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross."

The spiritual narcissist cannot exist in the Heavenly Jerusalem because he can only look at himself instead of God. Hilaire Belloc said that "a man who does not accept the Faith writes himself down as suburban." Suburbanized Catholicism has nothing to do with where we live. It is the narcissism that rejects the Heavenly City by wanting a therapist instead of a saviour. Holy Week shows the world the Passion to save it from such indignity.

Fr. George W. Rutler