08 July 2013, Monday, 14th Week, Ordinary Time ENCOUNTERING GOD: SUPERSTITION, HALLUCINATION OR FAITH? SCRIPTURE READINGS: GEN 28:10-22; MT 9:18-26 In the secular world, many people are experiencing a deep hunger in their hearts for transcendence. Materialism has resulted in man finding himself incomplete and unfulfilled. Secularization has also crept into the Church as well. There is a real danger of our Church services losing the ability to inspire, or to connect our people with God. So whether or not this is explicitly expressed, man wants to encounter God deeply in his heart, even for those who do not know Him, or have professed atheism or agnosticism. The real question is, whether God is real and if He is real, how can man encounter Him? The rationalists tell us that we cannot encounter God. They expound that we only know that He is real in our head. Through intellectual arguments, we can come to know that God exists and He is real. So one simply has to accept the doctrines of the Church and the teachings of the bible as true, even if we do not understand or experience what is being taught. Naturally, the rationalists opine that there are no real miracles today, and that a belief in miracles is based on mythology. It would be foolish for anyone to believe that the gift of tongues exist today. Only ignorant and unschooled people of faith practice it. And resting in the spirit is pure emo! Indeed, the intellectuals despise all notions of a God-experience. According to them, experience is only for the emotionally weak. They only want to feel high and they tend to exaggerate their experience of God. Such feelings are temporal and they are dangerous. As to the miracles of healing, they are coincidental and auto-suggestion. God will only work through medical sciences. As for vision, they are but a figment of our imagination and psychological repression of our desires. At any rate, people of faith do not need miracles or a God-experience. Pure, naked faith is what pleases God. As for those who depend on sacramentals such as holy water, holy oils, medals, crucifixes, they are just being superstitious. They should just have pure faith like the centurion. Some even go to the extent to declare that there is no need to attend Church services; that it will suffice to stay at home and pray. However, when we read the scripture, especially today’s, such objections and skepticism fly in our faces. In the first instance, we have the story of Jacob fleeing from his brother Esau who was angry and wanted to kill him for stealing his birthright. On his long trip to Haran to find a wife whilst allowing some time for his brother to calm down, Jacob had a dream whereby God assured him that the covenantal promise He made to his ancestors, Abraham and Isaac were also offered to him (Jacob) as well. God said, “Be sure that I am with you; I will keep you safe wherever you go, and bring you back to this land, for I will not desert you before I have done all that I have promised you.” It was in that dream and through that dream that God spoke to Jacob. When he woke up, he concluded, “Truly, the Lord is in this place and I never knew it!’ He was afraid and said, ‘How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God; this is the gate of heaven!’” So significant and real was his dream that “rising early in the morning, Jacob took the stone he had used for his pillow, and set it up as a monument, pouring oil over the top of it. He named the place Bethel”. This place became an important shrine for worship, although later, it also became a centre for idol worship. The point remains that Jacob never doubted that his dream was more than a mere psychological repression of his fears. On the contrary, it was the means by which God spoke to him and affirmed His love and fidelity to him and his fathers. Of course, Jacob was not the only person whom God spoke to through dreams. We have his future son, Joseph, who would later be renowned for his dreams and interpretation of dreams foretelling the future (cf Gen 37:5-11). Then we have the vision of Isaiah when he received his vocation to be God’s prophet (cf Isa 6:1-8). In the New Testament, God also spoke to Joseph, the husband of Mary, via the medium of dreams (Mt 1:20-22; 2:13-20). Even St Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia calling him to help the people there. “After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them” (Acts 16:9-10). So why is it that we are now so skeptical of those who feel that God could be speaking to them through their dreams? And speaking to anyone who claims to have a vision, we pour scorn on such a possibility, dismissing such claims as hallucinations. Similarly, in the gospel, we have the case of Jesus healing a woman who had been hemorrhaging for 12 years without any reprieve in spite of her seeing many doctors. But how was she healed? “She touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, ‘If I can only touch his cloak I shall be well again.’ Jesus turned round and saw her; and he said to her, ‘Courage, my daughter, your faith has restored you to health.’ And from that moment, the woman was well again.” Again we have similar instances of the Lord healing through such ordinary means. We read in Acts of how many were healed simply because Peter’s shadow fell on them as he passed by (cf Acts 5:15). We read too that “God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured, and the evil spirits left them” (cf Acts 19:11-12). Without a doubt, God works through such ordinary human elements such as dreams and objects. Even the Church recognizes the value of veneration of the relics of saints and martyrs, through which many have had their prayers answered and their sicknesses cured. So what can we learn from today’s readings if not the fact that we must not discount the fact that God works normally through incarnational means. Of course, He could work through direct means but He prefers to accommodate Himself to us so that we who are constituted of body and soul can encounter Him bodily, and not just spiritually. Through our body, we touch His Spirit. Like Jacob, we need sacramentals and even shrines and churches to help us become conscious of God’s awesome presence and abiding love for us. God is compassionate and patient with us. He allowed the woman to touch his cloak so as to show God’s sensitivity to our prayers and our inhibitions even when we seek healing from Him. God raised the daughter of the official to life by laying His hands on her and when He “took the little girl by the hand … she stood up”. The truth remains that we need the personal touch of a human hand or earthly things to help us experience the spirit and presence of God. So those who say they do not need sacramentals or the human touch are claiming that they are pure spirits! This is not to suggest that we promote such means that might appear superstitious to some people. What is the difference between superstition and faith in the final analysis? If we think that it is the object itself that heals us, that would be superstition. But if we believe that only God can heal us through the things we use as a medium of His love, that would be faith, not superstition. The importance of sacramentals and popular piety was endorsed and given its place in our religious life when the Congregation for Divine Worship issued a document on “Popular Piety and the Liturgy”, enumerating the principles and guidelines. Above all, the use of sacraments in the Church’s liturgy, especially the Eucharist, the Sacrament par excellence, would be the best argument to substantiate that we encounter God, or rather, God encounters us through human means and created things. Of course, we must qualify this truth by denying New Age Spirituality of their extreme position, where it is underpinned by pantheistic belief that the world is God, and panentheistic belief that the whole world is in God, without qualifying that God transcends the world. The corollary from such viewpoint is that we can be healed by using all created objects such as crystal balls, magnetic objects and the laying of hands, because they diffuse the energy of God by the very fact that they are part of God. In their pantheistic outlook, we are all gods, and in their panentheistic outlook, God is in us all. For us Christians, we believe that all healing grace comes from God alone, who often heals through us, but we are not divine beings. Even when we participate in God’s image and likeness, we are not divine by nature, but only sharing the divine life. Like the psalmist, we say, “In you alone, O God, I trust.” He is our refuge and fortress! WRITTEN BY THE MOST REV MSGR WILLIAM GOH ARCHBISHOP OF SINGAPORE © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ___________________________ - See more at: csctr.net/reflections/?utm_source=CSC+Weekly+Update&utm_campaign=708083f0b3-Weekly_Update_13_19_May_20135_13_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b56cc50263-708083f0b3-273542365#sthash.e68RFZxC.dpuf
Posted on: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 15:42:54 +0000
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