Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.

Between a rock and a hard place: living freely in the New Year

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Throughout the liturgical celebration of the Nativity of Our Lord, we have contemplated the initiative taken by God to save us and make us his people in Christ. The initiative is God’s, and it is for us to wonder and accept and come to live in the light of what God has done.

God’s initiative, his works, are clear in nature itself as created by God, in Sacred Scripture, which bears witness to what God has done in history, and in the sacraments of the church, which are actions of the risen Christ. These are all gifts on God’s part, offered freely to us for our salvation. Because they are gifts from God, they bear his stamp, not ours. They are like a rock that provides safety if we hold on to it but which destroys us if we ignore it. Religion is first of all about what God has done to show us who he is. God is like a rock. His actions and works constitute objective reality. The subjective side of religion, the experience we bring to what God has revealed, should begin with obedience to God and his ways. To do his Father’s will was what Jesus lived and died for. When our ways do not conform to God’s ways, our subjective experience becomes a hard place. To make our experience “softer,” we begin to bend God’s ways to our ways. We find a source of subjective satisfaction not in divine revelation but in an endless search for new experiences, sometimes for new gods. We cut reality to the size of our cloth, which never stretches far enough to hide us from God, to cover our nakedness before him. Caught in purely subjective desires and dreams, our experience can destroy who we are called to be.

It isn’t only our personal sins that move us away from God; we live in a society that tells us that subjective experience is where we start and where we end, no matter what is under consideration. No matter the matter, we are expected to ask first how this fact or this question fits into our experience, which means we are never open to what is genuinely new. We are unable to get out of ourselves and see beyond the social milieu that shapes our experience of life.

At the beginning of a new calendar year, many people make resolutions designed to help them live more freely. We resolve to give up addictions or habits that are slowly killing us. We resolve to be more generous with others and repair broken relationships, even with God. Sometimes resolutions are broken early on in the year because they are answers that don’t effectively address the “hard place” in which we live: habits of life, social customs, societal pressures. We can’t change our ways unless we are able to move our lives into a different place. This doesn’t means picking up and moving to another city or country; it means holding on to God and his ways, allowing him to draw us out of the hard place of our subjective experience towards the rock of objective truth.

Living freely as creatures of God and as beloved sons and daughters of God in Christ brings us into a narrow space between the rock of God’s gifts and the hard place of a world or a life without God, a life entirely determined by our ideas and experience. In that opening between the rock of objective truth and the hard place of subjective desire, we find our freedom and our happiness, in this life and the next. That place is discovered in prayer. Liturgical and sacramental prayer is the prayer of the church immersed in the mystery of Christ’s life and ministry. Personal prayer is the experience of God’s presence in our lives, drawing us out of ourselves and into his divine life, into the discovery that God enjoys being with us.

In prayer, we move from our experience of ourselves to our experience of God. This is a fearful experience unless our faith keeps telling us that God is love. Love makes demands, but fulfilling love’s demands brings great joy. As a free and prayerful people, the church receives the mission to tell the world about Christ and his self-sacrificing love. Today we call this the “new evangelization.” It’s not that God is new. God is neither old nor new; he is eternal. If our experience hides us from God or God from us, we need new approaches to telling the truth that God has revealed about himself and the world.

People hear what God is saying through the church only if they have listened to the church herself and not to what someone else reports that the church does or says. Sometimes I get letters asking why we don’t speak to gun control or health care or the plight of immigrants and the poor or, on the other side of the political spectrum, to abortion or married life or drug use. In fact, the church has spoken to all these issues and many more. Those genuinely interested in church teaching can subscribe to this and other Catholic publications and can consult the websites of the archdiocese (www.archchicago.org) and the Catholic Conference of Illinois (www.ilcatholic.org). What the church says is often not reported elsewhere because it would show that the church is something other than a medieval relic. The church has something to say to the problems of every age because the teaching of Christ covers all of human experience.

In encountering Christ in his body the church, we are set truly free, even from ourselves, and are brought into a new way of life, marked by truth that sets us free and love that keeps us safe. We learn to live between a rock and a hard place, bringing together what God has done objectively with what we desire in order to be subjectively happy.

May God fill your New Year with the personal happiness that comes from embracing what is forever true. God bless you.

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