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Understanding What Comes From God Associate Pastor's Column Sunday, March 12, 2006, 2nd Sunday of Lent
Lent is a beautiful and joyful season because we purify ourselves from those things that bring sadness, anger, frustration and emptiness into our lives, namely: sin, self-love, pride, sensuality and greed. It is a time to turn to the cultivation of the things that matter, the things of the soul. We therefore continue today our series on the gifts of the Holy Spirit turning to those gifts which pertain to the highest part of our soul, the intellect. The intellect is that power of the soul to apprehend the truth, to grasp the essence of things, to compare, to make assertions, to reason things out and to know in universal terms. There are various gifts which specifically (directly or indirectly) help our faith. So let’s discuss faith for a second before moving on to discuss more gifts of the Holy Spirit. One part of our faith pertains to the intellect, the part that regards what we believe. Another part pertains to our will, and that’s where we assent to what we have understood to be true. For by faith we assent to those things God has revealed, because he has revealed them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. Faith is therefore a virtue, not a feeling. Since it is a virtue, we need God’s help to live it perfectly, and that’s what the gifts do. “Faith comes through hearing” (Rom 10:17). What do we hear? What the Church preaches as the content of our faith, nothing more and nothing less. Regarding faith, two things happen in our souls: the first is that our intellect penetrates or grasps the object of faith, that is, we “get it”; the second is that we judge rightly according to it. That said about faith, let’s turn to the gifts. First, let’s distinguish four gifts that all have at least something to do with the faith: 1. Understanding – we grasp the faith, the content of the faith, and the things pertaining to the faith. (More about this gift below) 2. Knowledge – we judge created things rightly according to our faith. 3. Wisdom – we judge divine things rightly according to our faith. 4. Counsel – we judge actions, our own and others, according to our faith. Counsel is where the question of “applying my faith to my practical life” comes in. Now that we have distinguished these gifts one from another, let’s say something about the gift of understanding, leaving the other gifts for future articles. I’ll start with an example. Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, has gone around promoting the use of the enneagram in the development of the Catholic spiritual life. Fr. Mario Mazzoleni left the priesthood to live out an Eastern religion centered on Sai Baba. There are those who dabble with séances. Some enjoy promoting a sort of communist social activism as if it were acceptable to Catholic life or morality. Enemies of the Church attack the Papacy, Mary, the Eucharist, the truth of purgatory let alone heaven and hell. – A person with the gift of understanding needs no long academic proofs to understand these things are alien and destructive to the faith. (But the academic proofs do exist, by the way: understanding is not the same thing as anti-intellectualism.) Another example. When one hears on Catholic Radio someone like Fr. Mitch Packwa teaching that hurricane Katrina is not a punishment sent by God for the local victim’s sins, or one sees Fr. Steve Sheier discuss his own divine judgment with Mother Angelica on EWTN, or when one sees Bishop Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, impose an excommunication on all the Catholic polititions who are pro-abortion in his diocese, – by the gift of understanding one knows that these things pertain to the life and discipline of the Catholic Church. No long academic proofs are required for one with the gift of understanding, even though such proofs are available. Let us pray for the gift of understanding, so our hearts and minds can be full of the truth, free of deceptions which arise from the devil, the flesh and the world, and never rash in exposing our faith to things that will corrupt it. |