Hello, I'm Father Benedict Rochelle of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in the South
Bronx, and I'm here today with our fifth segment on the virtues.
Tomorrow, next edition, we're going to take Faith, Hope and Charity, one session for each
one.
Today we're finishing up the moral virtues in our series on Get a Life called What Happened
to Virtue.
And today we're looking at the virtue of courage or fortitude.
In the past programs we've made a distinction between natural virtues or good qualities
of human beings recognized in all cultures and societies, and the Christian or spiritual
moral virtues which have a different goal.
The goal is God Himself, and they are infused or brightened or strengthened by the gifts
of the Holy Spirit.
In this particular program we're going to look at the most popular of all the moral
virtues, courage.
It's not popular in the sense that everybody likes to be courageous, by no means, but it's
popular in the sense that all cultures in the world, even cultures that aren't doing
very well, will admire someone who is courageous.
They may not admire someone who is temperate or even just, but courage has a certain something
that appeals to people.
Now let's take a look at natural courage.
It is a gift or personality trait, character trait, which makes a person do two things.
It makes them persevere in times of difficulty, what is arduous, what is hard to accomplish,
and it also makes them brave in the face of danger.
And it gives them these qualities so that they can do some good.
If it's a quality of bravado, but not related to virtue, a brave criminal, then it is not
a virtue at all.
Adolf Hitler showed certain qualities of not being afraid or of going on in the face of
fear.
Several times attempts were made to kill him, but you can't say he was a courageous man
because he did not use this quality to do good.
We have people in our society that do stunts and tricks, they're daredevils.
That's not courage either.
Courage is an ability to face danger and difficulty in doing good.
And the supernatural or spiritual virtue of courage is an ability to endure difficulty,
to face danger, perhaps even to be killed in order to achieve salvation or to help someone
else in their salvation.
The spiritual virtue of courage has as its goal salvation.
You know that the tales of every nationality and people are filled with stories of courage.
We have them in the United States.
Each war will leave you with stories of courage.
Even though the people may have been frightened, they went on to become courageous.
Sometimes the person who has the most courage is the person who has a natural fear and anxiety
that goes on.
It's interesting that in Washington there is a war memorial to the men and women who
died in the Vietnamese War.
And regardless of what one may think of that war, certainly the people that went there
faced a very, very frightening and terrifying situation.
It's interesting that the war memorial in Washington does not show what the old 19th
century war memorials did, or even the 20th century.
Men with helmets bravely coming through the smoke, some triumph unseen.
No, it's very interesting.
It shows three soldiers and there is terror written on their faces.
Thank God somebody was finally honest about war.
It's terrifying.
In the past, the human race has tended to glorify battles.
It's about time that we didn't.
We admitted that those who went to war often to defend what they believed was the right
or the innocent.
Sometimes they were right, sometimes they were wrong, sometimes they were half right.
But nonetheless, they faced up to their fears and went on, thus exhibiting courage, so long
as they were doing something good or trying.
The Christian virtue of courage is different.
It is about salvation, one's own and somebody else's.
And we have our Lord Himself telling the apostles that they're going to need plenty of courage.
Right before He died in the Gospel of St. John, we have several quotations from our
Lord telling the apostles how much courage the Christian is going to need.
Read these to you.
There are so many quotations in the Bible about courage that I really don't, I couldn't
even pick them all out, but these are very, very much to the point.
This is John 15.
Listen to the apostles right before the Passion.
If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.
If you were of the world, the world would love its own.
But because you are not of the world, I chose you out of the world, and therefore the world
hates you.
Remember the word that I said to you, a servant is not greater than his master.
If they persecuted me, they will persecute you.
It's kind of stupid to be a Christian and to always want to be one in circumstances
where one will not be bothered, where one will not be confronted with danger, with rejection.
I think Christianity in our country has become terribly soft.
We don't want to disagree with anybody.
We almost think it's a sin if a church or a denomination or a bishop stands out against
the world, refuses to go along with the world.
As a present time, I must be honest with you, I think that Christian denominations that
do not take a stand for life are digging their own grave.
Our Lord continues and He warns the apostles very, very much that they are about to face
very, very dangerous situations.
In John 16, I have said all of this to you to keep you from falling away.
They will put you out of the synagogues.
Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.
But they will do this because they have not known the Father nor me.
But I have said these things to you, and when their hour comes, you remember that I told
them to you.
Don't try to be a Christian who is always safe.
That's not Christianity at all.
That's anthropological religion.
That's the rites of passage.
Our Lord says in the Sermon on the Mount, the pagans do these things.
In fact, in the history of the pagans, we can find people with real natural courage.
And unfortunately, in Christianity where we would often expect to find the supernatural
virtue of courage, we don't even find the natural virtue of courage.
The world is filled with many, many telling stories of great courage.
And our time is filled with many stories of danger, of horror.
There's a reading in the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament.
You know, the Catholic and Orthodox churches have a longer edition of the Old Testament,
there are seven more books.
This edition of the Old Testament was the one that was used by the Jewish people outside
of Israel, and it was decided at the Council of Carthage by the Catholic bishops at that
council that the Church would use the Septuagint or the longer Old Testament, longer Jewish
Scriptures.
This was exactly the same council that canonized and codified the New Testament.
It met in 398.
St. Augustine was the one who pushed through the necessity of finally getting a definitive
edition of the New Testament.
It was worked on by St. Jerome and published by Pope Damasus around 402.
So I don't apologize at all for using these books because it was determined by exactly
the same people who determined what books would be in the New Testament at the same
meeting that these would be the books of the Old Testament.
One of these books is the Second Book of Maccabees, and I'm reading the Revised Standard Translation
of the Second Book of Maccabees, which is in the Catholic edition of the Revised Standard
Version published by Ignatius Press.
This is a story.
I'll only read part of it to you, but if you're a Christian or Jewish and you don't know this
account, you've missed something.
It's worth knowing it.
It's talking about a pagan king who had domination over the Jews in the century before Christ.
It happened that seven brothers and their mother were arrested and being compelled by
the king under torture with whips and cords to partake in the eating of unlawful swine's
flesh, to violate the Mosaic law.
One of them, acting as their spokesman, said, What do you intend to ask and learn from us?
For we are ready to die than to transgress the law of our fathers.
The king fell into a rage and gave order that pans and cauldrons be heated.
These were heated immediately, and he commanded that the tongue of their spokesman be cut
out, that they scalp him, cut off his hands and feet, while the rest of his brothers and
mother looked on.
And when he was utterly helpless, the king ordered them to take him to the fire, still
breathing and to fry him in a pan.
The smoke from the pan spread red widely, but the brothers and their mother encouraged
one another to die nobly, saying, The Lord God is watching over us, and in truth has
compassion on us, as Moses has declared in his song, which bore witness against the people
to their faces when he said, He will have compassion on his servants.
And after this first brother had died in this way, they brought forth a second for their
amusement.
And so it goes through six of the brothers, and finally the youngest brother still alive.
Antiochus the king appealed to him and promised him with oath that he would make him rich
and enviable if he would turn away from the path of his father's.
Since the young man would not listen, it says in the book of Maccabees, the king called
his mother and said to him and urged her to advise the boy to save himself.
After much urging on his part, she undertook to persuade her son, but leaning close to
him she spoke in their native tongue as follows, deriding the cruel tyrant.
Now remember, this is a mother who has just seen six of her children dismembered and fried
alive before her eyes.
My son, have pity on me.
I carried you for nine months in my womb and I nursed you for three years, and I have reared
you and brought you up to this point of your life, and I have taken care of you.
I beseech you, my child, to look at heaven and earth and see everything that is in them
and recognize that God did not make them of things that existed.
Thus also the human race comes into being.
Do not fear this butcher, but prove worthy of your brothers.
Accept death so that in God's mercy you may get back again with your brothers.
And while she was still speaking, the young man said, what are you waiting for?
I will not obey the king's command, but I will obey the law which was given to our fathers
through Moses.
And the boy is tortured worse than the others.
And last of all, the mother was put to death after her sons.
What an incredible account.
In the Catholic liturgy there is actually a feast day of the martyrs, the seven holy
Maccabees and their mother.
And I read this to you with no apologies.
This is a story of incredible bravery and supernatural faith.
It makes no sense without supernatural faith.
For the Jewish people it was a betrayal, a violation of the law of Moses to eat pork.
This law was not incumbent on Gentiles according to the Jews.
The Jews did not think the Gentiles had to observe this.
If Gentiles believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they were not required to
follow the law of Moses.
Many of them would have reigned from pork, but it was not part of the laws of Noah that
they were bound to.
But it wasn't so much about pork, but it was about the violation of the law that Moses
had given to their fathers.
And for them to eat the pork would have been a denial of their faith.
This is courage.
In the present time we all need courage.
I guess I can tell you something a little confidential, not a secret.
Recently the bishops of New York and Pennsylvania had their five-year visit with the Pope.
Every five years all the bishops of the church must go on an official visit called an Adlimina,
the visit to the house of the Pope.
And they were gathered there waiting for the Pope to come in, the two cardinals of New
York and Philadelphia, and the bishops with them.
The Holy Father came in and He looked at them and His first words to them was, coraggio,
courage.
Anyone who wishes to stand up for revealed religion in our time must have coraggio.
These are unbelieving times.
They are quickly becoming times that are no longer indifferent to religion, but hostile
to any religion that stands up for the rights of God or the rights of life.
Religion could be tremendously popular in this country if it simply ignored the responsibilities
of the Ten Commandments.
Or we could be very selective.
We could be in favor of this, but not in favor of that.
We could defend this law, but not one that is unpopular.
Coraggio, says the Pope, courage.
And I'm sure he would mean it for every one of us at the Youth World Youth Day in Denver
last year.
I heard him say it, courage.
He didn't say it in Italian, he said it in English.
Courage to us all.
I realize that people who take God seriously, seriously monotheistic people, they think there
is a God who is the witness, judge, and creator of human beings, that He has made His will
known, even though He is mysterious.
There are many things about Him that are very mysterious, but He has made Himself known,
and He has required things of those who follow Him.
There are an immense number of monotheists in the world, even in the Oriental religions,
though we have been falsely informed that they are not monotheistic religions, many
times they are.
Anybody is a monotheist who believes that there is a personal God on the other side
of this domain of being who knows and cares and responds to us, who expects something
from us.
That's monotheism.
And in this world that we live in, monotheism requires courage.
Admittedly, it requires other things, requires wisdom, requires supernatural prudence, it
requires patience.
Most of all, it requires charity and forgiveness.
But at this time, it requires courage.
Many of you who listen to this program are distressed because of the collapse and decline
of human values in our society.
Many people getting on in years say, I'm glad I don't have too much longer.
Many people say, I'm terribly frightened about what's going to happen to my children and
my grandchildren.
Those people my age getting toward the end of the road look at each other and say, aren't
you glad you weren't born into this time?
It is a time of worldliness, self-indulgence, but immense danger.
Oh, we all breathe freely now because of the collapse of Soviet Russia.
But out of the collapse of Bolshevik communism may come chaos and disorder which would lead
to things that would make you wish for the good old days of Brezhnev and Khrushchev.
Not that they were good, but they might be better than what's coming.
These are days of immense technological progress, and Hitler and Stalin both proved that technological
progress can be very effectively used to annihilate millions of people.
In such a time, you do not want to be a slave of fear.
Long, long before Christ, Aristotle, the Greek philosopher said, we become brave by doing
brave things.
We have courage by testing ourselves in the face of danger.
This is all the more true in Christianity.
Don't be afraid to be one of the few.
Cardinal Newman, who I've been quoting in all this series, has this to say to those
who are disheartened because there are not very many people who stand up for truth, relatively
speaking.
A great many people don't seem to know what even truth is.
Newman writes, it is indeed a general characteristic of the course of God's providence to make
the few the channels of blessings for many.
It is plain that every great change is affected by the few, not by the many, but the resolute,
undaunted, zealous few.
One or two people of small outward pretensions, but with their hearts and their works, can
do great things.
They are prepared not by sudden excitement or by some vague general belief in the truth
of their cause, but by deeply impressed and often repeated instruction.
And since it stands to reason that it is easier to teach a few than a great many, it is clear
that such people will always be few.
He that believes in the Son of God has a witness inside of himself.
Both bears witness to itself by reason of its divine author.
Someone who obeys God conscientiously lives in a holy way, forces those about him to believe
and tremble before the unseen power of God.
To the world he seems to witness not.
Most people are totally unaware, bouncing along, but somehow or other this person is
able, as Newman says, to pass on the holy flame.
And others pick it up, cherish it, and transmit it themselves.
And thus, in a dark world, the truth makes its way in spite of darkness, passing from
hand to hand.
And thus the truth keeps its station in the high places of the world, acknowledged as
the belief of many, most of whom are ignorant of where the truth came from, how it began,
what it rests on, how it keeps its place, and despising the truth, thinks sometimes
that it can be dislodged.
But God reigns, and the truth remains.
Recently they did a great opera at the Metropolitan in New York, The Dialogue of the Carmelites.
Written by Poulenc, it is the true account of Carmelite nuns in France during the reign
of terror.
And one sister was a mouse.
She was always frightened.
The day before they are to be executed, the superior tells them she'll leave the door
unlocked and anyone who wants to run away can.
And one sister does.
And in the final scene of the opera, you see the sisters being led to the guillotine, one
after the other.
Wish!
And as they're going to the guillotine, they sing the great hymn, Come, O Holy Spirit,
Thou, come give us courage now.
And as the superior, the last one, goes up to be executed, out of the crowd comes the
voice of the frightened nun.
She's come to join them.
She's come to be there.
And she starts to sing.
The superior looks back, looks over her shoulder, and there is Sister Mouse singing, Come, Holy
Spirit, come.
The whole opera house is in silence as the curtain comes down.
The lady sitting next to me was not a Catholic, she was not a Christian, but she looked at
me with tears in her eyes.
The people in the opera house were deeply moved because of courage and faith.
And I assure you that in the world we live in, people are still deeply moved by religious
faith and courage, a faith that makes us stand by the truth.
Hello, I'm Fr.
Benedict Rochelle of the Franciscan Friars in the South Bronx in New York, and welcome
to Get a Life.
This is a series that we're doing on virtues and what virtue means, and today is the sixth
session of that eight-part series.
We're discussing today the theological virtue of faith.
I only wish that I had eight talks to just discuss faith.
It's such a marvelously fascinating concept, which is a great virtue, and it's very, very
different from any of the virtues I have discussed already.
We've already looked at prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, the great moral
virtues or great human qualities identified by the philosophers and by the saints, lifted
by grace to the level of spiritual or infused virtues, virtues that unite us with the love
of Christ, virtues which permit us to do genuinely good acts.
So we have the natural virtues, which are good qualities, and when they are lifted,
their goal changes so that the goal of prudence is no longer simply to live a nice life, but
to live a life preparing one for eternity.
These moral virtues have been very interesting, but today we shift gears and we move into
what are called the three theological virtues.
They're called theological not because theologians necessarily have them, but because you can't
have them without the gift of God.
They don't have moral virtues underneath them, as do prudence and justice.
They are not good human qualities.
I've occasionally related to Mr. Bennet's, William Bennet's book, The Book of Virtues,
which is quite popular right now, published by Simon and Schuster, and which is a collection
of stories and poems, very, very good for children and young people and even for us
old folks on virtue.
And interestingly enough, he's talking about the moral virtues, and I was surprised that
he put faith here.
But he does have a little explanation.
Faith, hope and love, he says, are formally regarded as theological virtues.
They mark dispositions of persons who are flourishing in life from that religious perspective.
What he could have said is they are purely the result of grace.
But he adds that religious faith is worldwide.
What he's really talking, I think, about is something that nobody would understand outside
of theological language, the virtue of religion.
Religion is part of the virtue of justice, is what we owe to God.
But today I want to talk about something quite different.
I want to talk about a living, personal relationship with the all-powerful, mysterious, all-knowing
God, and in Christianity with his Son and with that mysterious third person of the Blessed
Trinity, the Holy Spirit.
And the first thing we want to make absolutely clear is that faith is a gift.
You can't merit it.
You can't give it to yourself.
You can't argue your way there.
And this is a problem with many contemporary Christians.
The medieval scholars, the doctors of the church, oh, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St.
Thomas, St. Bonaventure, they had something they called faith-seeking understanding.
They were very clear that you could never understand all of faith and that you couldn't
reason yourself to faith.
You could reason yourself to a position where faith was a desirable thing, but you couldn't
give it to yourself.
This is something I think we have to keep very, very much in mind, and St. Paul in the
letter to the Ephesians puts it very, very succinctly in the second chapter, the eighth
verse.
"'For by grace,' a gift of God, "'for by grace you have been saved through faith.
And this is not your own doing.
It is a gift of God, not because of works, lest anyone should boast.
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand
that we should walk in them.'"
It's a gift.
There's a very famous philosopher who I think is improper to name at this point, who all
of his life has taught the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, mostly philosophy.
He's a retired man now, and he's never become a Catholic.
And somebody said to him, or even a Christian, somebody says, how can you be teaching St.
Thomas all your life and not become a Catholic?
He said, faith is a gift.
Now I know a very dear friend of mine who's dead now, Bill Cobb, and he studied with this
man.
Bill was an old-fashioned down-to-earth New Yorker, and he wouldn't mind me mentioning
this philosopher, but I don't want to embarrass the philosopher.
And he said, yeah, I went out to the University of Chicago, and a philosopher met me, brought
me up to the door at a church, kicked me in the behind.
I fell in, and he said, so long.
He brought him to faith, but he didn't give him faith.
Faith is a gift, and it's often a gift that God provides providentially.
I'm also quite convinced that we make a terrible mistake in contemporary America thinking that
faith is primarily something of the mind.
That's the content of faith, and the content of the mind and faith is important.
You have to use the mind, and you can use the mind even to get you to a good argument
for the existence of God or for the truth of the Gospel, but that argument is not faith.
Saint Paul makes it very clear that faith in many respects is something of the heart.
Now this is kind of interesting, because Saint Paul was such a genius, and he was a very
robust mind.
He said in Romans 10, the Word is near you, on your lips and in your heart, that is, and
the word of faith which we preach, because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is
Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips,
and thus he is saved.
Heart and body, lips, now that's an interesting thing.
Now what do they mean by the heart?
Well it's obvious they don't mean the physical organ.
I had open heart surgery.
It did nothing to my faith.
It neither improved it nor decreased it, although I was praying like mad when I got it.
I met a couple of people who have new hearts.
They have somebody else's heart who died, and they're going on somebody else's heart,
and it doesn't affect their faith at all.
So we're not talking about the biological heart, which is a pump.
We're talking about the heart of the being, the center of the being, which we can only
imagine because this is a mysterious psychic or psychological reality.
Nobody even knows what makes you you and me me.
There's no cognitive scientist.
That there are millions and trillions of little brain impulses constantly going on in the
computer.
There's all kinds of chemical and endocrine operations, glandular things going on which
feed into the experience we call the emotions.
There's thought, there's self-determination, there's all sorts of things, but who knows
how it all gets together and says, I'm here when somebody calls your name.
But someplace in that mysterious psychological reality is the center of it all, and that's
what they mean by the heart, the center of you, the center of me.
And that's where faith should be.
Now, you're not just a brain.
Every once in a while, if you hang around academia, the world of colleges and universities,
as I have for many, many years, decades, you meet people that are all brains.
That's what they are, they're brains.
And everybody's afraid of them.
They're sort of a mobile computer, and in that particular area, they can crush you.
But being a psychologist and also a priest at the same time walking around academia,
I've often talked to these very cerebral or brainy people and found out that their hearts
were broken, that they were very lonely, that they felt rejected, that they had felt rejected
as children, that they really didn't see themselves as rich or well-off, even if they had money.
But they often felt an impoverishment of relationship.
And they always seemed to me to be struggling with faith because they were doing it entirely
on their brain.
I felt sorry.
Now, intelligence, when applied to faith, is a magnificent thing, but the intelligence
must always be subject to faith.
Saint Francis, who was not a genius in this sense, he was a poetic genius, said, O Lord,
only let me know you that I may love you, because I do not want to know you except that
I may love you.
Faith, hope, and charity stick together.
And we'll get on to that little question in a few minutes.
There is in the Bible a marvelous description of faith.
Sit back and relax a minute.
You know, when you talk about faith in the Bible, my gracious goodness, you've got a
lot of things here.
You look up at Concordance, the word faith goes on for pages.
And as I was working on this conference, I was looking around for something about faith,
challenging to the heart.
And who else better could I quote in the words of Jesus himself in the 12th chapter of St.
John?
This is from the 36th verse on.
Now listen.
Try to hear Jesus saying this to you.
Look at the scene outside in Jerusalem, the big temple behind you, the crowds there, a
few people listening to him.
We start out in the temple and then he goes away and kind of hides.
You see him going alone.
And when Jesus had said this, he departed and hid himself from them.
For though he had done so many signs before them, they did not believe in him.
It was the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah that might be fulfilled.
This is a complaint against, of the Messiah against the unbelieving world.
Lord, who has believed our report, to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
Therefore they could not believe.
For Isaiah again said, he has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, lest they
should see with their eyes and perceive with their heart and turn to me so that I might
heal them.
Isaiah said this because he saw his glory and spoke of him.
Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in him.
But for fear of the Pharisees, they did not confess it, lest they should be thrown out
of the synagogue.
For they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.
Some great lines.
This is written by the evangelist and then Jesus cries out, he who believes in me, believes
not in me, but in him who sent me.
And he who sees me, sees him who sent me.
I have come as a light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness.
If anyone hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him, for I did not come
to judge the world, but to save the world.
He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge.
The word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day.
For I have not spoken on my own authority.
The Father who sent me has himself given me commandment, what to say and what to speak.
And I know that his commandment is eternal life.
What I say therefore, I say, as the Father has bidden me to say.
Does that sound like an intellectual argument?
No.
Jesus is appealing to his own personal authority backed up by the signs that he had worked.
Signs of mercy, compassion, signs that were miraculous.
This is the Gospel of St. John.
The first of the signs in this Gospel is a kind of light-hearted sign.
He changes water to wine for a poor couple at their wedding reception.
You know, you say, God is going to work a miracle.
Can we do something kind of solemn, you know, heal the sick or raise the dead or something
like that?
No.
It's 168 gallons of wine at a wedding.
You see, God has a sense of humor.
God doesn't just do always serious things.
There's the multiplication of the loaves and fishes.
Some of the scholars have trouble with that.
They think that everybody had soggy fish sandwiches under their robe and Jesus got them to share
them all.
Not a line in Scripture to suggest that.
He didn't give out soggy fish sandwiches.
There were nice crisp rolls and nice fish, something to make them rejoice.
Now more than ever I am convinced that faith is not an argument.
Although you can adduce arguments to defend it and you can use the mind to fit together
its various parts into something like a coherent whole, you can bring forth arguments for people
why they ought to believe.
But faith, as the philosopher said, is a gift.
And once that gift has been received, God alone gives us the gift, it must be backed
up by good deeds.
Now here's a great big argument between the Protestants and Catholics, and I want to tell
you that I never figured this argument out.
I don't see how it works.
Saint Paul, who was a rabbi, was very, very familiar with the good works, the ceremonial
and spiritual works that were called for by the law of Moses.
They didn't save anybody, but they got people ready.
They kept people in line.
And many centuries later, the great Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides, who was buried at
Tiberius next to Cephanum, Moses Maimonides sat down and he listed the precepts of the
law, and there were 613 of them.
So to be a very observant Orthodox Jew, you've got to keep 613 rules in mind.
It takes years to get them all down.
And this is why at the time of our Lord, and perhaps since then, when a non-Jew came to
believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they didn't suggest that he become a Jew,
because this was very complicated.
He could be one of those who feared God, like the centurion of Cephanum, whom our Lord befriends
by a miracle, that they would be those who feared God.
And the Jewish people in Hebrew call it Chachsi d'umad aholam, the believers among the peoples
of the earth.
Now the works of the law, St. Paul is very clear, don't save anybody.
But there are another kind of works, and St. Paul alluded to those works a few minutes
ago when I read in Ephesians, you know, that by faith we are called to do the works of
Christ.
Faith without works is a kind of dead thing, it's even worse.
We have St. James, that kind of forgotten writer of epistles.
In James' epistle, chapter 2, 14, he says, What does it profit, my brethren, if a man
says he has faith but has not works?
Can his faith save him?
If he has a brother and sister who is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you
says to him, Go in peace, be warmed, and be filled, without giving them the things needed
for the body, what does that profit?
So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
This is James writing, a man referred to in Scripture as the brother of the Lord.
The ancient church, as the Catholic church, believes that he was a kinsman, not a natural
brother, or perhaps even a step-brother, but that Mary was, as declared in the Council
of Ephesus in 431, Mary was forever a virgin.
Some will say, St. James continues, You have faith and I have works.
Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.
You believe that God is one, you do very well.
Even the devil believes and trembles.
This whole argument of faith and works, I think is a dumb argument.
I think it was puffed up at the time of the Reformation, so the people on both sides would
have something to throw at the other side, the Protestants and the Catholics, the Catholics
and the Protestants.
I never met a good, evangelical, serious Protestant who didn't do good works, and I never in my
life met an informed Catholic who thought he was saved by works alone.
Never.
Everybody, if they have living faith, real faith in Jesus, is going to bear fruit in
works of the apostolate, in the works of the confession, even St. Paul speaks about that
immediately, that one must confess one's faith, which is a work, in good works, in works of
kindness, compassion, mercy, charity, so that at the last judgment you won't come up and
say, well I was a believer, and Jesus will say, yeah, but I was hungry and you didn't
give me anything to eat and I was a stranger and you didn't take me in so, so long.
Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Now, I realize this is a tough talk today, but faith has got all kinds of marvelous things
in it.
Someday I'm going to do a whole series on faith if I don't check out first.
Now, we live in an age that's an unbelieving age.
It has a lot of problems with faith.
And let's take a look a little bit at the psychology of faith.
And I'm again here going to use my friend Cardinal Newman.
Faith brings us to mystery.
It stands on the back of reason, that is common sense that the whole universe didn't come
together by accident.
It's common sense that there must be a mind there that creates a little baby, that calls
it to love.
The very nobility and dignity to which human beings can rise is a witness that they are
not created merely by some gigantic cosmic force, but by something that we call a person,
someone who knows and loves.
Surely, we can't be more than what made us.
Cardinal Newman writes, I've come to this conclusion.
If I must submit my reason to mysteries, it's not much difference whether it's a mystery
more or a mystery less, when faith anyway is the very essence of all religion.
And when the main difficulty to any inquirer, anybody looking, is to firmly hold that there
is a living God, who in spite of the darkness which surrounds him, is the creator, witness,
and judge of all men.
And once the mind is broken in, and it understands that it is not itself the measure of everything
in heaven and on earth, but it doesn't know everything, that mind will have little difficulty
in going forward.
I do not say it will or can go on to other truths without conviction, but I do say this.
I do not say that it ought to believe in the Catholic faith without grounds or motives,
but I do say this, that once it believes in God, the great obstacle to faith has been
taken away, a proud and self-sufficient spirit.
When once a man really, with the eyes of his soul and by the power of divine grace, recognizes
his creator, he's passed a line.
Nothing has happened to him which cannot happen twice.
He has triumphed over himself.
And if he believes that God has no beginning, then why not believe that God is three in
one?
If he admits that God created space, why not admit that he can cause the body to subsist
without dependency on place?
If he is obliged to grant that God created all things out of nothing, then why doubt
his power to change the substance of bread into the body of his Son?
Those who believe in the eternal, living, true, and personal God are called monotheists.
There are many of them in the world.
Most of the people listening to me now, whatever their religious denomination is, they are
monotheists.
24 percent of Americans in a recent poll said they prayed and they believe somebody listened
to their prayers.
They are at least incipient and weak monotheists.
But what they need in faith is to stop merely following their mind and follow the beauty
and power of faith.
Newman says you can pursue faith through your mind, but you can make utility and natural
beauty the test of truth, and you will not at once reject Christianity or Catholicism.
But you will throw away its most momentous disclosures, deny its principles, explain
away its doctrines, rearrange its precepts, and make light of its practices, because you
have not gone to the truth by the power and beauty of faith.
This is a challenge to Catholics and to all believers, not to stop at the mind, but to
move in on the inner dynamism of the person, its power and its beauty.
And if you want to do this very simply, get down on your knees, close your mouth, listen,
bow your head before the presence of the living God, extend the hands of your soul, and touch
the wounded hands of Jesus Christ who died for us, and then you will know what power
and beauty is.
Thank you.
Hello, I'm Fr. Benedict Rochelle of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, the work
in the South Bronx, and I'm here today with the seventh in our series of eight presentations
on the virtues as part of our series called Get a Life.
And today we take up my favorite of all, hope.
I love hope.
I was born in the New York metropolitan area, and to survive there you have to have hope.
It's very important.
The idea of hope, however, is one we've got to clarify a little bit.
Earlier in this series we talked about courage, a kind of willingness to face life with its
difficulties, coraggio.
And courage has two sides, moderate optimism and moderate pessimism.
And unfortunately, us moderate pessimists, because that's what I am, a disciple of Murphy's
law that if it can go wrong, it will go wrong, us moderate pessimists, we take an awful beating
from the optimists, who think they're really the only ones who believe and have hope.
But I want to tell you, if you have real hope and you're a pessimist, you really have hope.
Optimism and pessimism are basically about how things are going to work out in this life.
They have nothing to do with the theological virtue of hope, which is about the next life.
The object of hope, like the object of faith, is the mercy, goodness and kingdom of God
after this world.
There is such a thing as human hope, which moderate optimists and moderate pessimists
have.
The optimists hope that everything will work out beautifully.
The moderate pessimists hope that when things don't work out beautifully, we'll be able
to find some other answer.
You might like to find out whether you're a moderate optimist or moderate pessimist,
and this is easy to do by what I call the open peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Go into the kitchen, make yourself an open one-sided peanut butter and jelly sandwich,
close your eyes and gently throw it up into the air.
And make up your mind before you open your eyes again, whether you think it came down
with the bread against the floor or the jelly against the floor.
If you decide the bread is against the floor, then you are an optimist.
If you decide that the jelly and peanut butter are facing the floor and you're going to have
to start all over again and clean up the floor, you're a moderate pessimist.
But you're going to find out, and may I suggest just very tactfully that you'll be happier
in life if you're a moderate pessimist, because half the time it's going to come up one way
and the other half is going to come up the other.
It's 50-50.
It's a chance.
But if it comes up, bread down, and you're an optimist, you say, oh well, that's what
I expected.
But if the jelly is all over the floor, you're going to say, how could that happen?
I'm bitterly disappointed.
On the other hand, if you're a moderate pessimist, and I belong to that large club, you open
your eyes and the jelly is against the floor, you say, well, that's the breaks.
I was expecting it anyway.
I already have the paper towel available.
We'll move on.
But if it comes up, bread down, on a nice clean floor, you say, oh, marvelous, wonderful.
So if you're a moderate pessimist, life will be ordinarily filled with delightful surprises,
whereas if you're a moderate optimist, it will be filled with a never-ending series
of disappointments.
But none of this has to do with the theological virtue of hope.
People say, well, I hope my team wins.
I hope it doesn't rain on the strawberry festival.
I hope our church gets enough money to pay its mortgage.
I hope the car doesn't break down.
Those are all good things, but they're not the theological virtue of hope.
The object of the theological virtue of hope is salvation for you, those dear to you, and
the world.
That's the object of hope, salvation.
And this is why there are people in totally hopeless situations who can have great hope.
There's a beautiful Protestant hymn that I love to sing.
They're going to sing it at my funeral.
I've made arrangements called Abide With Me.
It's a hymn written to be sung by a person who's dying.
And it says, Help of the helpless, abide with me.
Hymn goes on, when friends depart and all comforts cease, abide with me.
That's hope.
And there are people condemned to death, martyrs, innocent people put to death by oppression.
And they walked into the death chamber or into the axe or the wild beasts, the Christian
martyrs, and they had hope.
They knew that this life was slipping through their fingers, that there was no earthly hope
for them at all.
But they had hope.
They had hope in God.
And so today, we talk about that marvelous, beautiful virtue of hope.
The great religious poet of France in the early part of our century, Charles Pegue,
he wrote some poems that are really said by God in the poem.
And God's poem about hope is beautiful.
He says, Ah, hope, my little daughter, my beautiful little daughter in her green dress,
laying in the world before me.
Hope.
Now we just talked in our last part of this series about faith.
And faith and hope are very, very closely bound together.
Let's see what our old friend St. Paul, that passionate believer, had to say, because he
was not only a passionate believer, he was also a passionate hoper.
This is in his epistle to the Romans, the fifth chapter.
Since, therefore, we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus
Christ.
Through Him we have attained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in
our hope of sharing the glory of God.
That's our hope, sharing the glory of God.
More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings.
That's the motto of believers in New York.
We rejoice in our sufferings.
More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance.
Endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint
us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has
been given to us.
Now, I'm keenly aware that some people watch this program who don't have faith and consequently
don't have a divine hope.
They write to me.
Unfortunately, I'm often not able to answer the letters.
I get too many letters.
So many people write to me, and I can see that they want to believe.
Sometimes they write to argue.
Sometimes they write to say, well, I wish I believed this, but I don't.
And all I can say to them is ask.
Ask for the gift of faith.
You know, in our neighborhood we have beautiful big old Catholic churches built by the immigrants,
and we also have a lot of little storefront churches.
But I sometimes, when I'm walking past the storefront church of its before services,
I look in, many know me, say hello to the minister.
But before I start, I always look at the congregation, usually elderly people, quite poor.
They've lived in the slums all their lives.
And I just say, ask and you shall receive.
They all start to say, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you.
They have it memorized.
So if you're an unbelieving person, and I don't in any way assume that you want to be
that, or it's your fault, or it's my fault that I happen to be sitting here dressed up
like an ad for the Canterbury Tales preaching the Gospel, just ask.
Ask and you shall receive.
Seek and you will find.
Ask for hope.
Now what is the hope?
Let's let our Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospel of St. John tell us this hope.
Let us listen to the words of the greatest hope.
I've used these in other broadcasts before.
If you've heard me, this is my text, John 14.
It's right before the death of Jesus and He's there with the apostles.
And He says, He's warned that the Son of Man will go up to Jerusalem and He will be mocked
and scourged and spit upon.
And when they have mocked Him, they will put Him to death.
And they've been frightened, the apostles.
Don't say that.
And He said, let your hearts not be troubled.
Be not afraid.
Believe in God.
Believe also in Me.
In My Father's house there are many rooms.
If it were not so, I would I have told you that I'm going to prepare a place for you.
And when I go, I will prepare a place for you and I will come again and I will tell
you to myself that where I am, you also may be.
And you know the way I am going.
And Thomas said, Lord, we don't know where you're going.
How can we know the way?
And He said to him, Thomas, I am the way, the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father but through Me.
I have read those verses many times to the dying.
And I have mentioned to various people, I think it's a little ghoulish, that I hope
I get a terminal illness because I want to make a final video series on getting ready
for death, probably going to call it Going First Class.
I don't want to put on television to say to dying people, look, I know how you feel, unless
I'm dying, but I'd be very happy to get a nice terminal illness, chances are pretty
good I will, and I'm going to do my tapes, Getting Ready for Death, How to Think About
Death, Saying Goodbye to Everybody, Tying It All Up, and hope that where He is going,
I can come.
That's what it's about.
And I realize this is terribly unsophisticated at our time, terribly unsophisticated.
I was called up to participate in a workshop with some psychologists, psychiatrists, clergymen
of different denominations about loss.
Would you mind participating in a seminar on loss?
I said, well, I'm not really the right person because I always lose my wallet and I lose
my hat and I go through life giving out prayer books.
I'm the largest retail distributor of prayer books in the world, they've got them all over
the place.
I'm the wrong person to talk about loss.
No, no, no, no, we don't mean that kind of loss.
Well, what kind of loss do you mean?
Well, you know, like big loss.
I said, you mean death?
Well, yes.
Oh, well, why do we say that?
So I went to the seminar and there was all kinds of thinking by very nice people about
death.
One of the most interesting things I heard is that life is a series of little deaths
that gets you ready for the big one.
That's true.
But I scandalized everybody.
They were horrified because I said, if you're going to visit somebody who's dying and you
know what's going to happen, tell them.
And if you don't know what's going to happen, keep your mouth shut.
Don't say much, don't talk about the weather or everything else.
Because you know, death is either the door to everything or is the door to nothing.
And it is part of monotheism, it is part of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.
And probably a great many Buddhists and Hindus also believe this, that the me that's here
now and the me that's there then are going to be the same person and the me that's there
then is going to remember the me that's here now or it's not going to do the me that's
here now very much good, as an old man once said to a southern preacher.
I have hope.
And I'll even go so far and shock a few people, I'll get some nasty letters, to say I hope
that I have hope like a child.
Unless you receive the kingdom of God like a little child, you cannot enter into it.
And I'll talk to you about hope, I'll tell you what it's about.
The end of the Bible is a scary book, the apocalypse is a mysterious book.
Scholars have worked on it for centuries and have all sorts of theories about what it means
and about what it doesn't mean.
But what it is about is about the next world.
This is my text.
The course of the years of working with poor children as I did at Children's Village, a
number of them died.
They were killed or died in accidents and I was deeply, deeply affected.
Like everybody else in the course of my life, I've known the young, the poor, the innocent
to die, sometimes in grotesque ways.
And what one of us has not said, a terribly sad goodbye to those we love the most.
And this is my hope.
And then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had
passed away and the sea was no more.
And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven from God prepared
like a bride a dawn for her husband.
And I heard a great voice from the throne saying, behold the dwelling place of God with
His children.
And He will dwell with them and they shall be His people and He Himself will be with
them and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more.
Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for all those things have
passed away.
People have gone into gas chambers.
They have gone before firing squads.
They have painfully been there in the hospital waiting death and they had hope.
I heard of the young missionary priest recently who was bit by a dog and he died of rabies.
And a few days before because the final hours are excruciatingly painful, they gave him
what they call the mercy cocktail so that he would sleep on his way into death, natural
death, they weren't killing him.
I wondered what his, I had taught this young man what his thoughts were.
Now he must have prayed.
And you would say, oh isn't that terrible?
Oh no, I don't think so.
Because he was a man of faith.
And as he took the drink and said goodbye and he would be asleep, he would sleep his
way into death, a natural death, he fell asleep thinking of the new heaven and the new earth
and the sky and the sea.
That's hope.
That's hope for the hopeless.
If you don't have it, don't laugh at anybody that does because we're praying that you
will get it, that it will work.
A friend of mine, his wife was dying, he's a very fine man.
He's an atheist.
Very good friend.
Atheists make good friends by the way.
They work very hard at it because they figure this is all there is so I better be a good
friend.
They don't make bad friends, some atheists.
And he was so upset and he said to me about his wife, I wish she could live 400 years.
I said no you don't.
You wish she could live forever.
Now forever is a tough idea.
We human beings living in the world of time, forever sounds awful to us.
I mean if you had to do anything forever, most people when they think about heaven they
think of an everlasting church service which is very appealing.
How would you like to go to church and it last forever?
I've been there sometimes and I thought it was going to last forever.
No.
It goes out of time and beyond time and this is what forever means.
Then I go back to my friend Cardinal Newman and this is a prayer of Cardinal Newman's
but it's got a lot of ideas in it.
My God, I am to live forever, not for a time and I have no power over my own being.
I cannot destroy myself even if I wished to do so.
I must live on with intelligence and consciousness forever, even in spite of myself.
Without you eternity would be another name for eternal misery.
In you alone have I that which can stay me up forever, for you alone are the food of
my soul.
You alone are inexhaustible and ever offer me something new to know, something new to
love.
At the end of millions of years I shall find in you the same or greatest weakness than
at first and shall seem then only to be beginning to enjoy you.
And so on for eternity I shall ever be like a little child beginning to be taught the
rudiments of your infinite divine nature.
Don't worry about being bored in eternity.
We live life with an eye dropper.
Reality comes to us in little drops called hours and days and years and decades.
In drops called millennia or eons, but none of it or all that we have ever experienced
is like eternity.
Many people don't believe because they don't have a concept of eternity.
They can't.
This is why as Newman said, we must bend our stiff neck before the mystery of God.
If you are a believer in this unbelieving time, rejoice in your belief.
If you are a believer, correct, confront, and pray for those who destroy other people's
faith in God.
Because faith is the most precious thing a person can have.
If you're someone responsible to teach the truths of faith to others, don't teach them
in some half-hearted lukewarm apologetic slapdash form.
Teach them with fervor, with interest.
Everybody wants to know what's going to happen to them when they die.
Because everybody knows they are going to die.
Hope – we can never express in any adequate way what the object of religious hope is.
We can never express adequately what the kingdom of God is.
No one can.
Because it exists out of time, but all human beings have a handle on hope.
Every human being who stops to think, who hasn't killed their emotions, hasn't driven
their inmost feelings down into a pit of despair, hasn't hidden in a whole jungle of narcissistic
self-love.
Every human being has a handle on eternity.
And that handle is we want to find what is beautiful and good and truthful, that which
will bring together all of the disparate elements of life and experience.
We do not want to perish forever, and we do not want that which we love to perish forever.
Every one of you will face the death of those dear to you.
And most of us will be conscious when we know that we are about to depart from this world,
that we are about to go.
Our close relatives will come to see us.
Our sisters and brothers who live at a distance will come down because we've taken a turn
for the worst, and we momentarily recover.
And we know that they won't be able to come again.
They say goodbye to us on Sunday evening and go back to work or to their home.
And they know and we know that before next weekend they will return for our funeral.
And as they say goodbye, they cry, but they can't say what they're crying about.
They can't even think about it.
But this is the last time they will hear our voice, or we theirs.
And that is when you have hope.
And thee, O God, have I hoped.
I will not be put to shame forever.
If you have hope, pray that it may be strengthened.
If you seek hope, pray that you will find it.
If you have no hope, then cry out in the depths of your despair, and I guarantee it will be
given to you.
As an altar boy, I used to hear at the side of the grave the prayer of the priest, let
us languish not in fruitless and unavailing grief, nor sorrow as those who have no hope.
But through our tears, look meekly up to you, the God of all consolation.
I always pray for those who have no hope, that they will get it.
Can I end with a prayer of Newman?
O Almighty God, strengthen me with your strength and console me with your everlasting peace.
Soothe me with the beauty of your countenance and enlighten me with your uncreated brightness.
Purify me with the fragrance of your ineffable sweetness.
Bathe me in your own presence and give me to drink, as far as mortal man may ask, of
the rivers of grace which flow down from you, the Father and the Son, and the grace of your
co-substantial everlasting love.
This is the prayer of faith and hope.
Whoever you are, please, please, say that prayer.
In your own words, ask for hope for you and those dear to you and for the world.
Hello, I'm Father Benedict Groeschel of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, who live
and work in the South Bronx in New York.
This is the eighth and last part of a series we've been doing on virtue.
And I hope you've seen some of the other programs, but if you haven't, we will give you a little
bit of a background before we take up our last virtue, which is the theological virtue
of charity or love.
The virtues are powers given to us by grace, the grace of God, that build on natural good
qualities which are called natural or moral virtues.
And in the case of the four great moral virtues, prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude,
when they are spirit-filled and enlivened by grace, their purposes end, so that the
purpose of natural prudence is to organize your life so that it's reasonably comfortable
and decent, and the purpose of the supernatural virtue of prudence is to organize your life
so that at the end of it you will be able to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Somewhat different purposes, and they lead lives in different directions.
We've also been considering the three theological or totally God-given virtues of faith, hope,
and today, love.
Occasionally, I borrowed some ideas from Mr. William Bennett's book, The Book of Virtues,
which has just come out and has many nice stories in it helping people to educate children
in virtue.
I never met Mr. Bennett.
He doesn't even know I'm going to be using this book, but it has some good stories about
virtue, and virtue is a kind of forgotten thing.
My other guide in this series has been John Henry Cardinal Newman, the great Oxford scholar
who is now proposed for beatification and eventual canonization.
And of course, I've built everything on sacred scripture, and I've been using the standard
revised version of the Bible published by Ignatius Press, a very fine Catholic Bible,
Catholic edition of the RSV.
And we come today to love or charity.
Oh my, how do you say in 28 minutes something about love?
Because love means many things.
It's a very, very ambiguous word.
People get killed out of love, and sad to say, people kill for love.
When I was a little boy, I was sent on New Year's Eve to stay with my grandmother.
I was sent on the bus.
I was about 12, and I went down to have supper with her so she wouldn't be alone on New Year's
Eve.
When I got on the bus in Jersey City, there was a drunk, and he was singing in the magnificent
patois accent of our little city.
You always hate the one you love.
You always crush the fairest flower.
And I said, you know what?
That's true.
I was 12 years old, and I was becoming a psychologist.
Love is a complicated thing.
In sacred scripture, especially in the words of Jesus and his followers, love means something
very particular.
We often call that charity, caritas in Latin, and agape in Greek.
Saint Paul writes so beautifully about this spiritual love.
First Corinthians 13, if I speak in the tongues of men and angels, and I have not love, I'm
a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal.
If I can give prophecies and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and I have all faith
so as to remove mountains, but I have not love, I am nothing.
If I give away everything I have and deliver my body to be burned, and I have not love,
I gain nothing.
For love is patient, kind.
Love is not jealous, is not boastful, is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way.
Love is not irritable or resentful.
Love does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.
For its prophecies will end and tongues will cease and knowledge will pass away.
For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy imperfect.
For when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.
Now I know in part, then I shall understand in full, even as I have been understood fully.
So faith, hope, and love abide, these three.
But the greatest of these is love.
Now love has many sides, and some people think some of those sides don't fit with God at
all.
But I do, and I was deeply impressed by a book I read about love by a great English
scholar like Newman, also an Oxford scholar, C.S. Lewis.
He wrote a book, it's not so easy to read, but you get a whole lot out of it, The Four
Loves.
I'm going to try to, with apologies, to make Mr. Lewis's observations a bit simpler.
There are four kinds of love.
There's the love of what we need and we enjoy when we get it.
This love has gotten a bad name because of its Greek name, which is eros, and people
identify it with sexual desire.
But that's very narrow.
Because love, eros, is the love of everything that fulfills me.
So if you love great music, or you love good food, or if you don't even love good food
but you're desperately hungry and get a ham sandwich, or if you're Jewish, a tuna fish
sandwich, then you love your sandwich.
I think it was Bernard Shaw who said the most sincere love most people have is for food.
And Augustine even says, there's an eros for God.
You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in
you.
And the fulfillment of that desire for God, that is happiness and beatitude.
He says, Augustine says, O God, you shouted out and broke through my deafness, you burned
brightly and chased away my blindness, you breathed your fragrance upon me, and even
now do I pant after you, you touched me and I burn for your peace.
That's spiritual desire, eros.
So don't give eros a bad name.
It can.
Love can be crazy, God, love can be selfish, love can be dangerous.
And then there's another love that almost is completely forgotten.
It's called the love of belonging, or the love of what I belong to.
It's called in Greek, storge, in English letters, s-t-o-r-g-e.
You never heard of it, and there's not much of it around anymore, but it used to be terribly
important in the United States.
This is a love of family, of country, of cause, of my own people, of my own, what belongs
to me.
And so a form of storge is patriotism.
When I was young, a little boy, the terrible war was going on, the Second World War.
And men considered, and women considered it an honor to struggle, to fight, perhaps to
be killed for their country, for what they believed was the cause of right.
Lots of people got married on storge.
They didn't even know the person they married.
Most of the marriages that ever took place in the human race were arranged.
The couple may have met each other at the church door or the temple door.
But it is a business relationship, and that is a love affair.
In the United States we have just the opposite.
It starts as a love affair and it ends up as a business relationship.
That was storge.
And as this kind of love of belonging has declined, most of the time we only see it
with fanatics for certain kinds of sports events.
Oh, and you see it in Europe with the soccer events.
That's, you know, Columbia against Ireland or something.
That's storge.
Sometimes minority groups have much stronger sense of it than the big, dull majority.
My people.
Whatever the minority group may be, that's us.
In the feminist movement, you see a lot of storge about being a woman because of the
unfortunate and unjust position that women were often put in.
Sisterhood, they call it.
That's storge.
And when you look at what happened in Rwanda recently, where two tribes mauled each other,
killing little children, old women, that's storge gone mad.
St. Augustine in the City of God, he took a step beyond it and he said, ultimately,
all people are children of God.
He said, I've heard that there are pygmies in Africa, but I don't even know whether they're
there.
I've never seen one.
But if they are there, they're children of God.
Everybody.
And St. Augustine somewhat prophetically looked forward to the day when human beings would
feel loyalty to a great single human society founded on the truth of God.
Sometimes when I walk around the United Nations, I was there recently to do something for part
of the United Nations, and I think perhaps this is the beginning of the dream that St.
Augustine had of one human family that we would all belong to.
In Paul it said, in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male or female, all ones flavor
free, but it's a long time coming.
You might ask yourself, do you have a love of God for belonging to his family?
In the Jewish Scriptures, in the Psalms, the Old Testament, when it speaks about the love
of God, this is often the kind of love of God that is speaking about in the Psalms.
That I went with joy with the throng up into the temple.
I have loved, O Lord, the beauty of thy house and the place where thy glory dwells.
St. Paul says, love the brothers.
Christ stepped beyond Storgé when he said, love your enemy.
Do good to them that hate you.
He was always talking about Samaritans, the other side.
Storgé can be narrow.
And then there's another love, the love of friendship, of mutuality.
You and I have something in common together.
We're friends.
We care about each other.
We're willing to make some sacrifices for each other.
Friendship is a marvelous thing.
Cardinal Newman, who we've been quoting, said that he considered it one of the greatest
blessings of his life.
He said the great blessing of his life, that he had had good friends.
And certainly in his writing, he always shows that his best and most faithful friend that
he felt closest to was Jesus Christ.
Christ himself said, I have not called you servants, but friends.
Greater love than this no man has, but to lay down his life for his friends.
In America, we hope that families are built on friendship.
We hope that husbands and wives are friends, that in-laws are friends, that parents and
children are friends.
And once in a while, when you bury an old person, their son or daughter is there and
will say, my mother was my best friend.
But so many times in families, people are not friends.
They may be held together by a certain loyalty, but it's too bad they haven't worked at being
friends.
And you know, friends is a two-way street.
If you want your friend to like what you like, you have to like what they like.
Many times in my life, I put up with things that I really didn't like very much, but it
was what my friends wanted.
I hope I didn't fail them.
But friendship is a marvelous kind of love.
And because human life is itself passing, part of what we hope for is that when we die,
we do not lose our friends.
St. Augustine, speaking about a friend of his named Nebridius, says, oh my dear friend
Nebridius is dead.
He no longer waits, oh Lord, for words from my lips, because now he drinks at your eternal
springs.
But I know that you let him know that we pray for him, that he thinks of us.
For you, oh Lord, at whose streams he drinks, are ever mindful of us all.
The medium, the way, the system, the wires, if you will, by which we are in contact with
our dear ones in the next world who have gone before us, that medium is the very being of
God Himself.
In Him we live and move and have our being.
And in this world, when there is a good and true friendship, believe me, it exists in
the medium of God.
We are as much dependent for friendship between each other in this world as we are dependent
on God for friendship with those who have gone before us.
And then there is selfless love.
The love that loves when there is no mutuality, when there is no friend on the other side.
And this love is called agape, A-G-A-P-E, with an accent on it.
This word is very, very frequently used in sacred Scripture.
It's what St. Paul uses to describe love.
It was the description I just read in Corinthians.
But actually, the word comes from pagan Greek literature, where it is very rarely used.
But when it is used, it is used for someone who sacrifices their life for the benefit
of another or of the whole state or the whole group of people.
And this word was picked up by the Christian writers, by the evangelists, the Greek word
to translate the word of our Lord, who did not speak Greek, wasn't speaking in Greek.
They used this word, selfless love, agape.
And it's what we hope to have a little bit of.
St. Augustine gives some very interesting examples.
You know, St. Augustine is kicked around a lot by stupid people or ignorant people who
never read his works.
Here's somebody criticizing St. Augustine, ask him if they read everything he wrote or
even part of it.
You haven't read anything.
St. Augustine gives a beautiful example of agape.
And here in the studio today, there is someone, a friend of mine, who knows exactly what the
example means.
He says, we see selfless love when one member of a marriage, one spouse, is so ill that
they don't even know the other person is there.
But this other spouse lovingly takes care of them for years and years, perhaps with
no response at all.
And St. Augustine says, that's agape.
And that's the kind of love that Christ had for us.
St. John says, this is the love of Christ that he first loved us, who were unlovable.
What in the world did God want to do getting involved with this fallen human race, this
mess of crazy people?
Why did he want to come here with all the wars and goings on and lies, pride, and everything
else?
Why do you get involved with this mess?
Why do you say, well, listen, I made that earth.
Let's forget it.
Let's let it go.
Let them do their own thing.
No, no.
No, no.
That's not what happened.
God came.
God loves.
God comes into our hearts and moves us.
God causes us to be saved.
And that's love.
That's love.
Let's ourselves open our hearts to that mysterious kind of love, so that we will love when we
don't get anything back.
Let's talk first of all about loving God.
We love God.
We don't get anything back.
Suppose you love the presence of God.
Most religious people do.
They love when they pray, they feel close to God, they go to church, they hear a hymn,
they're meditating on the sunset, and they say, isn't this marvelous?
Isn't this so beautiful?
I love God.
And then God goes away.
They feel nothing.
They feel like an atheist.
Heart is absolutely dull and dark.
They're in a dark night, and they continue to be faithful.
They can't even pray their mind is so distracted, or they're so depressed, or they're so beaten,
so angry, so what?
But they don't give up.
They stay there.
That's eros, replaced by agape.
That's the love of fulfillment, replaced with selfless love.
Or it can be the other.
They've been loyal to their church.
They've been loyal to the cause of God, and they get kicked around, betrayed, castrated
over the side.
The big people in a church don't give them a chance.
And when that happens to people in a religion, no matter what religion it is, they get mad
at God.
Hmm, what do I need the church for?
They let me down.
You're not in church for yourself.
You're there for God, and they remain faithful.
And many times in the lives of saints, we find that, many, many times.
There's one saint, St. Joseph Colossus.
He died on false charges, suspended from the priesthood.
He couldn't even say Mass.
But he was faithful.
And then we love as a friend, and God leaves us alone.
We give everything for love.
We have a mutuality with our Lord.
We don't seek for things for ourselves.
We sacrifice lots of things.
We hold on when nobody else is there.
And it seems that we're all alone.
I think our Lord Himself knew that when He said on the cross, my God, my God, why have
you forsaken me, and we're a faithful friend as He has been to us.
Believe me, you need lots and lots of grace to do that.
And finally, you have nothing left.
Archbishop Goodyear, a spiritual writer, says in his book, The School of Love, love will
take everything you have and ask for more.
It will demand things of you you never expected to give.
It will cause you to go on journeys that you never expected.
And when you've done everything in your power, and you're lying there by the side of the
road, half dead, love will walk by.
Say it was your own fault.
And then he says, if you persevere, if you go on, if you don't give up, then you will
know what eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and it hasn't even entered into the
hearts of men to think what God has prepared for those who love Him.
I do not think that you can seriously try to love others and try to love God, and not
come to a point where you must have a selfless love.
If you signed up for this, if you signed up to follow the Gospel, then you must know that
you follow someone who said to God, why have you forsaken me?
Someone has said in the Gospel, in the New Testament, what will a man give for love?
In the Song of Songs it says, love is more powerful than death, and its flash is the
brightness of the divine light.
Love is stronger than hell, and it's true.
Give everything for love, and if you hold on, even your disappointment will be taken
away.
Cardinal Newman says, in one sense, love is all virtues at once.
It's the root of every good disposition.
It grows and blossoms in all of them, in faith, hope, in courage, in temperance, in prudence.
All these virtues are parts of love, and when love is described, all of those others are
necessarily mentioned.
Love is the material, so to speak, of which all graces are made, the quality of mind,
which is the fruit of redemption, and in which the Spirit of God dwells.
We love because it is our nature to love, and it is our nature because God, the Holy
Spirit, has made it our nature.
We've all heard the words, abide in love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and
God in him.
Many people tell me, they feel badly, that their life hasn't amounted to much more.
It's a feeling that comes on you in your fifties and sixties and seventies.
Many, many good people say, I didn't accomplish anything.
I say, surrender yourself to love.
Do loving things, even to unloving people, in little ways, and then you will be like
God.
Francis Thompson, the poet, says, love needs, love's meriting, but not God.
God loves us when we don't merit it.
Christ died for us when the whole kit and caboodle of us didn't deserve anything.
There's love, and that's why Christ could say, and only he could say it, love your enemies.
Do good to them that hate you.
Pray for them that persecute and calumniate you, and then you will be like your heavenly
Father.
Brothers and sisters, whether we like it or not, we are united as human beings, and we
will be united in either love or hate, because we were made for love, and when we don't have
love we fall away, and when we do have love, everything else, all the other questions are
answered right then and there.
Thank you.
Come again.
Thank you.