Fr. Jacob's June 2015 Newsletter Message

Ordinary People

Pete, let's call him that, had been a successful businessman. He was an engineer and had built up and then sold his multimillion company. By the time I knew him he was retired. His wife was a devout member of my church. Pete was an atheist. They lived in a mansion in a village somewhere in rural England.

Pete was bored. He chain smoked his way through days. The evenings sustained his only hobby. He'd built a simple observatory in his back yard. By night he sat in the gloom, gazed down his telescope and stared deep into the darkness.

What had he learned from his interest, I once asked him? Hundreds of billions of stars in our galazy. Hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe. Photons travelling across trillions of miles before striking his retina. What did he make of this? I can't remember his exact words. It was a lovely day. We were sitting in his garden. He was drawing on a cigarette. "Life is meaningless", or some such, he gently offered.

The dark and distance up there echoed, so to say, on a dark and distance inside. A kind of vertigo. We were nothing faced with the vast scale of the universe. The frigid dark extended as far as he could see. Before it, we were less than a pin prick.

I thought then and still think now that Pete was both right and gravely wrong. Right to find himself lifted up and humbled before the Lord's Creation. Right to contemplate the sublime vastness before us and to recognize our own smallness. Right to give himself over to that disposition always within us to desire, to seek, to contemplate that which exceeds our grasp, that which is truly awesome - an infinity before which our minds bow and our hearts tremble.

Pete gave himself to this longing by gazing into the night sky, as I too had done as a teenager. It's the sublime vertigo of the mountain top, or the intellectual insight, of a birth or death. It's the encounter with a goodness that shimmers with glory.

Yet something went gravely wrong. Like a grief that got stuck, Pete's encounter with the mind blowing scale of our universe, cast him down but did not lift him up. He was unable to make sense of the longing within him to be awed or see how it gestured beyond itself.

For our desire finds its fulfilment in the contemplation of the one who is Infinite. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Him. To the eyes of faith, Creation may blaze with intimations of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So that the people of the Lord, the sublime wonder of Creation points beyond itself to the One in whom our longings finds their fulfilment. To come to see this is to be cast down - which is what Scripture means by the fear of the Lord - and simultaneously lifted up - so that our minds delight in His Love, and our mouths burst with His praise and thanksgiving.

Few of us spend our evenings gazing awestruck into the night sky but we walk daily amongst mortals created in the image of God. Our neighbors, colleagues, family, enemies, the little ones and the dying are created by the Lord to be glorified. Their faces too can whisper of the awesome Love of the Trinity and his promise of glory. Jesus Christ died for them. It's easy to get stuck, or avert one's gaze but we Christians know the awesome truth, before which our minds are cast down in awe and raised up in praise, as C.S. Lewis teaches:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity bust be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Nest to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat - the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

To the Most Holy Trinity, be honor and praise, might and majesty, now and forever.

God bless you,

Fr. Jacob