The Map: How to Get There

THE MAP: HOW TO GET THERE

Theology: the Science of God
In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, ‘I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!
Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of colored paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only colored paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach, only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want get to America.
Don’t Go to Sea without a Map
Theology is like a map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But the map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God – experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are really likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion – all about feeling God in nature, and so on – is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.
In other words, Theology is practical: especially now. In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones – bad, muddled, out of date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God, which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones, which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression – like believing the earth is flat.
C.S. Lewis

What is Grace
There is something else in the world besides poor, weak human nature. There is grace. Grace is this higher wisdom, a higher power that can come to us. The word grace, or “gratis,” merely means that it is free. We cannot merit it in the strict sense. It appears repeatedly in the New Testament. In the Greek, its name is charis. And it is mentioned about 150 times. If there is another life above the purely natural or human, then it is possible for every Christian to lead a double life, a real double life: a natural life and a divine life; a human life, and a spiritual life.


How to Change Direction
If we are to change our direction, a new power is needed. For example, if I take a ball and throw it across the room, the ball will continue in a straight line unless some superior power averts it. So too, natural human beings continue in certain directions, like Paul would have continued in his persecution. Sinners would continue in their sin. Agnostics would continue in their doubt unless some superior power intervened. And that is the power of grace.
Grace and Will
When grace comes into the will, it gives us new power, new strength that we never had before. It gives us a new ability to resist temptation. Too often in this world as soon as anyone becomes a slave of sin, we speak of him as having a compulsion. We say, “Oh, he is a compulsive drinker. He is a compulsive eater.” Now that is true. The word that our Lord used to explain that compulsion was slavery. But this does not mean that these people have completely destroyed their freedom. Believe me, there is always a little area of freedom left in an alcoholic or in anyone who is given over to the slavery of sin. Sins, which started with free acts of our own, weaken our will, but they do not completely destroy it. It is possible for grace to establish a beachhead. Grace has its D-Day, and God can get in to anyone. After all, when we are trying to cure people of vices, we can never drive out a vice. We can only crowd it out. How do you crowd it out? You crowd it out by putting in something else. The grace of God comes in. When we begin to love Him, then these vices begin to be pushed out. Once a new love comes in, we are changed.
How does Grace come
We receive millions of graces, called actual graces. Everyone receives them, not only Christians. Every Moslem, every Buddhist, every communist in the world receives actual grace. But to be united with God we need what is called habitual grace, a more permanent grace that which creates in us a likeness that remains. How is this grace communicated to us? How does it get into the soul? Perhaps you have seen signs on roadways. They are often painted on rocks and read, “Jesus saves.” Yes, indeed He does. But the very practical question is how? We have a span of twenty centuries between the life of our Lord and our days. Yes, He is God. But how does He pour and infuse His divine life and power into our souls? He does it by means of the sacraments.
The Sacramental Principle
We can define the word “sacrament” in a very broad way. In Greek it means “mystery.” But a sacrament is any material or visible thing that is used as a sign or a channel of spiritual communication. We will go back about as far as we can to explain mysteries. We might say that the Lord made this world with a sense of humor. What do we mean by “a sense of humor”? We mean He made it sacramentally. We say a person has a sense of humor if he can see through things. We say a person has no sense of humor if he cannot see through things. We say he’s too thick. Now God made this world with a sense of humor, in the sense that we were always to see Him through things, like the poets’ do. We would look out on a mountain and think of the snowflake, and dwell on the purity of God. Notice that we would not be taking this world as seriously as do the materialists, to whom a mountain is just a mountain, a sunset is just a sunset, and the snowflake is just a snowflake. The serious-minded people of this world write only in prose. But those who have this penetrating glance of perceiving the eternal through time, the divine through the human, have what we call a sacramental outlook on the universe.
Natural Sacraments
There are certain signs and events in our daily life, which are a kind of natural sacrament. Take, for example, a word. A word has something audible about it and at the same time something unseen, invisible. If, for example, I tell a joke and if it were a very amusing one, you might laugh. But if I told it to a horse, a horse would not even give a horselaugh. Why? Because you get the meaning. That’s because you have a soul, reason, and an intellect. A horse lacks that spiritual perceptive power and hence does not get the meaning. So it is with a handshake. A handshake is something visible, material, fleshy, but there is also something spiritual about it, namely, the communication of greeting and welcome. If I take my right hand and lay it upon my left, this is not a handshake. It has the visible aspect about it, most certainly, namely the clasping of hands, but it lacks that invisible element which is the communication of personal warmth. A kiss is a kind of sacrament. It is something visible, and at the same time something invisible, namely, the communication of love.
Sacrament and Architecture
Have you noticed how devoid of decoration our modern architecture is? What a contrast to the cathedrals where there were all material things, even cows and angels, sometimes little devils peering around corners! The ancient architecture was always using material things as signs of something spiritual. But today our architecture is flat, nothing but steel and glass, almost like a crackerbox. Why? Well, because our architects have no spiritual message to convey. The material is just the material, nothing else, hence no décor, no significance, no meaning, no soul. I wonder if décor and decoration in architecture has not passed out of the world at the same time politeness has. We certainly are not as polite in this century as we were in other centuries. Possibly the reason is because we no longer believe that persons have souls. They are just other animals, and hence, they ought to be treated as means to our ends. When you believe that in addition to a body there is a soul, then you begin to have great respect and reverence for personality.
The Body is a Temple
What does grace do to our human nature? First of all, it makes the body a temple of God. That is one of the reasons for purity. What is a temple? A temple is a place where God dwells. Remember when Jesus went into the temple of Jerusalem and the Pharisees asked for a sign, and our blessed Lord said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will rebuild it.” He was not speaking of that earthly temple, He was speaking of the temple of His body, because in that human nature of Christ, God dwelt. By our participation in that divine life he dwells in us. That’s why the body is sacred. That’s why we have reverence for it. The body is not a worm, something vile. It is His temple, and one day it will be glorified too.
Christ was the Great Sacrament
Christ Himself was the great sacrament because He was the Word made flesh. He was the God-man. We would have seen a man, but we would have known that He was the Son of God. Therefore, Christ is the supreme sacrament of history. His human nature was the sign of His divinity. We saw God through His body. We see eternity through His time, and a loving God in the form of a man who was like us in all things, save sin. Our blessed Lord took his human nature to heaven. Once He was glorified in heaven, He became our mediator, our intercessor, and our high priest who can have compassion for us and on us because He passed through our temptations and our sufferings and our trials. Because He is God as well as man, He is going to pour down upon us from heaven His truth, His power, His grace, and His life. How will He do it? He will not do it through what we might call His “bodiness,” because that is already glorified in heaven. He will do it through things and also through human natures. He will use certain things in this world as extensions of His glorified body. These things might be water, bread, and oil, and so forth – channels or vehicles for the communication of His divine life.
Christ Works in the Sacraments
The reception of the grace that is in the sacraments is very effective in our soul because it is Christ that confers the grace. By the mere fact, for example, that we turn on the faucet, water comes out. The water does not come because we subjectively believe that water will come forth. The divine life of Christ is poured into our soul by the mere fact that we receive the sacrament. Of course, we must not put an obstacle in the way of receiving the sacraments. But it is Christ who baptizes; it is Christ who forgives sins. There are ministers, of course, and there are bishops and priests, but we loan Christ our eyes and our hands and our limbs. It is He who gives the grace. That, incidentally, is why, even though you received the sacrament from an unworthy priest, it would still be a sacrament. Sanctification does not depend upon the priest. Because sunlight comes through a dirty window, sunlight is not polluted. A messenger may be very ragged, but he can still bear the message of a king.
Not Dogma, a Person
As Catholics, we do not subscribe to a system of dogma. We begin with a person; the person of our Lord continued in His mystical body the church. What is faith? Faith is the meeting of two personalities. You and the Lord. There is no adhesion to an abstract dogma, but rather a communion with a person who can neither deceive nor be deceived. The authoritarians start with a party line. We start with our Lord, the Son of the Living God, who said, “I am the truth.” In other words, truth was identified with His personality. Remember when you were a child. What did you consider your home? Just a sum of commands given by either your mother or father? It was more than that, was it not? It was the love of their personalities. Our faith, then, is first and foremost in Christ, who lives in His mystical body the church. It is only secondarily in the explicit beliefs. If our Lord did not reveal them, we would not believe them. If we lost Him, we would lose our beliefs. He comes first.
The Church is Christ
To a Catholic there is nothing credible in the church apart from Christ who lives in it. If we did not believe that our Lord was God, if we said that He was only a good man, we would never believe in the Eucharist or the Trinity. If we believed that Jesus was simply a human being who perished in the dust, we would not believe in the forgiveness of sins. But we know that our Lord once taught, governed, and sanctified through a physical body, which He took through His mother, and now we know that He continues to teach and govern and sanctify in the mystical body, which He took from the womb of humanity. His first body was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit; His mystical body was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Therefore we accept every single word of His – not just what His secretaries wrote, but we receive His living words, living through the centuries. You have heard it said, “I want no church standing between me and Christ.” There is no church standing between us and Christ. The church is Christ, for the church no more stands between Him and us than my body stands between me and my invisible mind. The church is what St. Augustine called the totus Christus – the whole Christ – and therefore His truth living through the ages. Thank God for your faith, your faith in the person of Christ who is the eternal contemporary.
Love not Fear
It is true that in every single system of authoritarianism fear is the basis of obedience. But because we start with the person of Christ, the basis of our obedience is not fear, it is love. You cannot love dialectical materialism, but you can love a person. Between our Lord and us there is the bond of love. These two are inseparable. That is why our Lord did not communicate to Peter the power of ruling and governing His church until Peter told our Lord three times that he loved Him. The power to command in the church comes only from obedience to Christ. Therefore, the submission that we as Catholics make to the church is something like the submission that we make to one of our most devoted friends. It is like the obedience of a son to a loving father. We do not feel any distance between our Lord and us. As a pupil becomes more and more attached to his teacher by absorbing more of the truths of the teacher, so too, the more we become more and more united to Christ, the more we love Him and also the more truth we absorb. The more we know our Lord, the more we obey the truth manifested through His church, and the less we fear. That is why scripture says, “Perfect love casts out fear.” The more His truth abounds, the more we love Him.
We Have the Map
Now our truth, therefore, in the church is a truth that is come down to us from Christ. It is a truth that is so noble that when we begin to wander away from it, we lose our way. There’s a tremendous satisfaction in having a map. That is what the truth of Christ is like in the church. We may get off the road; we may get off it by sin, we may get off it by error. But as long as we have that map, we can get back on the road. There are indeed some people who once they get off the road, tear up the map. That is a still greater tragedy.
Bishop Fulton Sheen