The Battle for the Sacred and the Banner of Love

Christianity is about a blood battle for the sacred, the flowing of new life, of living water under a banner of love. Once, someone told me that religion was the main cause of war. He believed that Christianity makes people irrational. At the time, I felt that atheist ideologies (Fascism and Communism) were probably far more violent than any religion ever was. Then, of course, there was 9/11 and later the fall-out over Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address. In Russia and the Ukraine, in Israel and Gaza, in countless other hotspots, bloodshed and the sacred are deeply connected, but not merely in irrational fanaticism. Without fully realizing it, wars over the sacred are always a battle for the human heart, and only what has already played out in the secret judgments of the inner man ever manifests itself in the diabolic structures of violence that scar human history.

Material ideology marks our current world order, in all its violence. When man is understood principally a material being, he is only an inefficient machine who can be improved. On a practical level, this means replacing human agency (freedom and responsibility) with technology. The result is technocracy. Under this form of governance, only the material and the future are sacred in human life. Everything else, as we saw during COVID, is expendable, and all propaganda is justified to the extend that it results in compliance, the further surrender of human agency to the machine.

Whereas traditionally the sacred involved the one part of reality that did not change while the profane, while not evil, was regarded as dangerous, as that part of reality that was in flux, a place where one could lose one sense of self and one’s standing in the world if he ever lost hold of the sacred, technocracy proposes the opposite. Under materialism, the world as it actually is regarded as more than dangerous, but evil. The division between the sacred and the profane is no longer the unchangeable in relation to what changes. Instead, it is the future versus the present locked in bitter contest in which what is sacred (the future) must overcome what is profane (the present). Rather than helping man live in the profane, this new vision of the sacred compels man to condemn whatever impedes the future he has imagined for himself. So are Christians condemned for defending marriage and family against political forces that sees these institutions as oppressive.

If only the myth of technocracy stopped at such condemnations. What is technocratically sacred, that is an unrealized future of some kind, confers on governmental authority the obligation and legitimacy to make an absolute claim over humanity. While pledging a life without suffering, technocracy demands some homage of life and limb in the present - some sacrifice of human agency to a nameless bureaucracy. No one is morally responsible when we allow machines to make the decisions for us. People design the machines and run the bureaucracies, it is true, but they do so in such a way that responsibility is always ambiguous. This means a collective sacrifice of conscience for a material cause, a whole community’s worship of an idol that everyone knows is not God but pretends is so if only to get along or to get ahead. In the vacuum, wombs become death chambers and institutions mutilate the bodies of our children to recreate them in the genderless, sexless image of the machines that the institution serves.

There are instances where this technocratic materialism appears at first to be religious (as indeed some Islamic and Christian political movements contemplate their cause). But do not be fooled: care is always taken to make sure that the spiritual is subject to and defined by a measurably material purpose (the extinction of Israel, or the expansion of the Russian Empire, or some defense of Western hedonism). Whatever the case, spiritual needs remain unmet in such charades even as they appeal to unchecked righteous indignation. They never rise above the level of technocracy - for if only the Great Satan (assert your favorite villain here) is eliminated can the sacred (future material success) be achieved.

A more spiritual people does not believe in the destruction of its enemy but searches for ways to turn animosity into new opportunities for friendship between peoples - and if it must fight for some sacred purpose, it realizes that freedom for what is sacred is won at the price of blood, and blood is precious. So it fights under the shadow of a higher standard than its own cause, seeing an end to which every means must be commensurate.

The blood flows more freely the more fanatically material the cause. Whether theist or atheist in appearance, technocracy always deadens the conscience, numbs against the interior accusations that would otherwise convince a soul of the horror it has committed, and all this until the material result completely robs the soul of its sense of standing in the world. Disoriented, the conscience accepts the unacceptable because it believes the cause, in all its visible and measurable materiality, is all it has. Just as an orphan grasps for his place because he can only rely on himself, these souls grasp for the material not knowing that they cannot live by bread alone. What a way to live — but we are all drunk with it.

Yet, the heart is a treacherous thing and subjecting it to what merely appeals to the material imagination only works for a while. Men need something meaningful to support the weight of existence and without the firm ground of the truth, they soon fall into nihilism. Put differently, meaning is for life what blood is for the heart, just as life needs meaning, the heart needs blood. The error of our time is the myth that the merely material provides sufficient meaning for the heart. No material cause can replace man’s spiritual purpose. The 20th and 21st Centuries are full of examples that show how, in the end, limiting human potential to the merely material ends in violence. Bloodshed fills the vacuum that materialism creates in the heart even if in terrible and evil ways.

Materialism (Communist, Fascist or Consumerist) can only restrict human existence to the making, serving or consuming of material goods until the spirit finds release in the shedding of blood. Devoid of the truth, what materialistic systems deny the heart is violently grasped for in the senseless sacrifice of the innocent. Whether atheist or theist, pragmatic or romantic, materialism unsuccessfully attempts to enchant the guilt ridden, scapegoating, anxiety driven imagination into extinction. It might dull and never fully remove the deep ache that can suddenly express itself in violent outbursts, even if the violence is to oneself. Such violent recourse is disguised in the antiseptic environs of an abortion chamber or a re-education camp’s torment, or a murder spree of unarmed and unsuspecting victims. Each form of violence expresses a demented rebellion against the meaningless vacuums that materialism creates and then attempts to dismiss. Lurking under every form of materialism, the heart needs blood sacrifice.

Blood sacrifice and meaning in life are connected. There are other religions that are not driven by political purposes and are not embraced for the sake of power, and they more adequately understand blood offering. Such religions tend to be either primitive or ancient. They do not dismiss the spiritual but seek answers to death, to the disharmony of existence, and to the longing of the human heart. The answers these religions do not impose systems onto human affairs but instead, attempt to submit the heart to truths found in the very order of reality itself. Rather than impose an imagined order onto reality, these religions understand themselves as disciplining the heart and imagination to the way things truly are even if they cannot see this with certainly or without error. For these, something of the sacred is at least partially discovered as a gift around which the profane finds meaning. This discovery costs blood sacrifice, not as an exceptional outburst that temporarily deadens the conscience, but instead to order judgments of conscience to humanity’s need for the sacred.

There is another answer. Christianity is not a religion in any material, or primitive, or even ancient sense. It is a faith, the acceptance of revealed truth. Its faith knows the fullness of saving truth, without error, and with certainty. As do ancient and primitive religions, this faith approaches the sacred as a gift and sees in this gift a task for the sake of humanity. This task involves confronting the alienated and fragmented soul with the truth in a way that only the life-giving unity of the Church can know.

This is why, in the Christian faith, defending the sacred is worth a good argument. Proposing the truth pricks the conscience and goads to goodness those who otherwise confront the problems of death, guild and desire for God without the saving truth of the Gospel. Such an argument has the form of a blessing. Such a blessing confronts, humbles, and offers the heart meaning so deep and rich that the very fabric of reality itself would seem ripped open to allow access to things that materialism and even other religions only grope for and despair to find. Unlike ancient religions or new ideologies, where new blood sacrifice is continually offered, the Christian faith is sealed by sacrifice once and for all. At the heart of this faith, the one sacrifice is mystically renewed in the worship of believers until the saving Blood of the Cross pours through the Mystical Body of Christ for the salvation of the world until the end of time. Such is the Mass - the Divine Liturgy - the Holy Eucharist.

Palm Sunday is all about the procession of God into His Holy Temple. He comes to bless, welcomed at first, but ultimately met with violent hostility - the same violence that rages in materialized, over-sexualized and technologized hearts today. To overcome this hostility, blood would need to flow bringing mercy into misery, love into the absence of love, meaning into the absence of meaning that all hearts suffer. The order reality that Christ would re-establish had already baptized His imagination and flowed forth from the very substance of his soul. He wanted to bring the Father’s plan to completion and that meant subjecting himself to an order broken by sin until, himself broken, He could raise up in it with a love no longer subject to death. He would pour himself out in love until the disharmony of sin would itself be caught up into a new symphony of truth. In the great canticle that He breathed forth on the Cross, his human heart was at last free to love the way it was meant to from before the foundation of the world, and every heart that joins by faith to this living sacrifice finds the same freedom.

In Him, blood would flow with love to infect every human fault with divine faultlessness. Christ’s is not the fanatic love of an ideologue, but the faithful love of an only begotten Son that circumscribes the meaningless aches of humanity with the ache of the Father for humanity. His is not the blind primitive and ancient love seeking answers to death, sin and desire, but a love with eyes wide open to the anger and fear the rages in what most wounds alienated and fragmented humanity.

The love of the Eternal Son who was born of the Virgin Mary beholds the hostility of all of humanity, the cancerous evil in each and every heart, while beholding the excessive love of the Father and suffers them in his heart them until broken and pierced. This is where blood flows - the blood of man and of God from this one saving source who, as God’s Son, is both man and God. His heart suffered human hostility to God through an obedience of love that exhausted that hostility and in this love to the end, opened up humanity to a new spiritual birth. This birth comes to us by Blood. The blood of Christ poured out for us is the new life of humanity, a goodness that mystically joins us together into one Body with Him, a new spiritual meaning that establishing communion, integrity, and a fullness of life.

The Saving Blood of Jesus: the Church knows and safeguards this medicine of immortality and the antidote of death. Every blessing in the Church (whether formal or informal, whether by liturgical rite or a spontaneous sacramental) each and every one, flow from this spiritually inebriating Blood to reveal the truth about sin, about God, and about righteousness. The Truth and the Blood go together in a sober intoxication of the conscience and the heart - the divine enchantment of a love stronger than death. Rather than dull the conscience, to offer this Blood in true blessing awakens a pain that must needs be addressed, sharpens the judgment about where one actually stands if he stands at all, stirs a fantasy grasping intellect to repentance and allows a heart to weep over itself and the brokenness of the world. Water and Blood flow in such tears. Anyone who acts in the name of the Church to obscure such saving truth offers no good word, no bene-dictio, for without the saving Blood, what good is it? But when the Church acts in the Name of the Lord, who can resist the Blood and the Water?