The Blessings and the Power of Christ

The Church Offers Something Much Better than Cavalier Approaches to the Sacred

Our present culture does not understand the struggle of between life and death that the human person undertakes. Our post-Christian technocracy presumes that this struggle is fundamentally a material, biological, visible reality. It is preoccupied with preserving health and wealth at any cost not realizing that death is not primarily a bodily or biological reality. Alienation from humanity, from body and soul, from one’s own fecundity arises from entirely different causes and only expresses itself in the material as if a symptom of a disease. Our culture has closed its eyes to the invisible, religious and spiritual magnitudes of the great human dilemma. Like children closing their eyes in a game of hide and seek, the thinking is that if I do not see it, it does not see me. As in the game, no matter how hard we shut our eyes, the deeper problems of death and existence always find us.

Some of our own social experts (the ones who believe it best for us to keep the eyes of our hearts shut tight as possible) would have us believe that whatever evokes awe and reverence pertains to deep ingrained mental constructs that evolved over time for the survival of the species. This is the same consciousness we find in some ecclesial leaders who argue that innovations surrounding blessings, even at the expense of scandal, serve the good of society. In this way of thinking, what is now actually sin will be judged virtuous in the future, and, therefore, what and how we bless should be accommodated to this inevitable likelihood.

Note in this attitude toward sin, it is the religious institution that must repent and convert, and not the believer. It is an odd faith to adopt. The guesswork of moral-spiritual evolution must be accepted as fate. Some may argue this evolution in terms of a myth of eternal return and others a forever unrealized utopia, some toward nihilism and others toward a mysticism of identity. Whatever the case, the blessing is reckoned as a magical emotional crutch to limp through the stress and confusion to which the world of constant changes subjects it. Sacred structures bend around the subjective whims of the moment instead of the heart gaining entry into something beyond its own subjectivity. Blessings are but pious pablum.

Contemporary religion is a far cry from the ancient cultures who contemplated how the sacred stands both at the beginning and end of human history, at the highest peaks and deepest depths of existence. These cultures perceived better than us post-Christians that without the sacred, human life is subject to the terror of time and change, fully capable of forgetting its purpose and becoming lost in meaninglessness. History knows that peoples who forget the sacred always disappear.

So ancient peoples to whom the Gospel was first proclaimed were religious, on a constant search for God, reaching out to Him even if in mistaken and profoundly flawed ways. They realized that they were in great peril and that without holiness in their lives they would perish. If those pagans often could not distinguish good from evil, the law of God was written on their hearts. They blessed one another in vain efforts to relieve their gnawing consciences, waiting for a word of hope but unable to secure the truth in the limits of their own traditions.

It is because they knew that they needed true access to the sacred that the ancient pagans had an openness to the Christian proclamation. What the ancient person could not have anticipated, even when it was prophetically promised him, was that the sacred would break into humanity in a definitive way to reveal the truth about God and humanity. Flawed and mistaken ways of blessing one another, limited by ignorance and weakness, were set straight and healed when God in his goodness revealed Himself through the womb of a Virgin. And, they came to believe this because the virginity and courage of the Church was a credible witness to this new power.

It is in the life of the Church, the people who received this revelation and dared to pass it on, received and gave a very different kind of blessing. For them, blessing is not a crutch, but an undeserved gift at the service of an undreamed of future filled with mysteries so meaningful that the present world in which it is received is not able to contain it all. These blessings were blessings of power — the touch of the One Risen from the dead communicated through His mystical Body. Against the confusion and ambiguity of dying cultures, this blessing was filled with eternal power to cause conversion, liberate from spiritual oppression, to heal and even to give new life. Such blessings have as their end not emotional comfort, even if they do console, not a sense of belonging, even if they do lead into communion, but instead salvation from sin and death.