Seek First the Kingdom - The March of Hope - Chapter 7
The Simplicity, Richness, and Unity of the Kingdom.
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Let us now explore, in light of the previous section, how the new worldview given to me by Christ in his Eucharist and through his scriptures began having an immediate impact on my life. How did things change for me in my day-to-day living?
For lack of a better description, I had been cursed with a whirlwind of destruction and complex confusion before my healing at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary. I had no interior unity; I had “dis”-integrated. In the aftermath of the beautiful event with Mary, and having been immediately blessed with the new worldview, I walked into a place of “re”-integration, unity, and beauty. We must walk carefully, taking a step at a time, being careful that our way is secure and that the ground is solid.
Suppose you have ever had the privilege to stand on a beautiful, remote hillside, overlooking a field covered in wildflowers and grassland, with a view of distant rivers and streams running into fresh lakes that reflect off their waters the soft images of the landscape around them. In that case, you will be able to understand and master the language of this entire next section well.
As we move forward, here and through the following two chapters, I would like you to continue painting this scene I just described in your imagination as I do my best to develop imagery for what happened going forward on my March of Hope with Joan of Arc and Thérèse. In effect, I would like for you to take this time to contemplate.
Imagine now that you are standing on this hillside, far from the noise and bustle of our civilization. It is very early on a cool, summery morning, and a soft but deep mist is covering the beauty, the distant hills, the meadows below, the rivers, and the lakes. You see the panorama before you only very partially. The scene is slowly absorbed into your spiritual being with great mystery and anticipation. You are happy there, even though much remains hidden.
Now let me add a condition to this contemplative vision you are forming. This condition is that you have not been here before; this is your first time seeing the place. You cross over a threshold on a hilltop and see this hidden and mystical landscape for the first time. Because you have not been here before or ever seen it entirely in the bright sunlight of the day, it remains a mystery, a partially observed phenomenon.
You can imagine in your contemplative musing that it is entirely possible, even natural and intuitive, to have a sense of the great beyond. You feel astonished by the view though you cannot peer through to capture the full color and hue, observe the details of the scenery, or describe it sufficiently in words. In short, you know it is magnificent even though you cannot see it.
As the sun rises and its brilliance streaks over the landscape, the mist begins to retreat as if a veil were being pulled back or as if a curtain were rising over a grand stage. The beautiful scene now becomes even more astonishing. Mystery has given way to exhilaration driven by the nobleness of the objective beauty before you. Time stands still, and you temporarily break through to eternity before returning to the realm of time and space. After taking all this in, you run down the hillside to tell others.
The March of Hope can best be described with this imagery. This journey uniquely resembles the contemplative stillness of a rising mist over a magnificent landscape, as described above. In a significant sense, this is what it has been. St. Paul puts this journey into the very same perspective when he writes:
“Now we see only reflections in a mirror, mere riddles, but then we shall be seeing face to face. Now, I can know only imperfectly; but then I shall know just as fully as I am myself known.”[1]
The new worldview I described in the previous section was like this landscape with rising mist and bright colors and tones filling in the shadows. The March of Hope is a journey through time and space, yes. But it is also beyond that, a mystical journey where the sunlight of God’s revelation burns away the cloudy mist in our souls.
Keeping your mind’s eye on this image for a moment, I would like to pause temporarily to make a crucial point, one that could easily be lost in this land of Catholicism on the other side of the gateway leading into this kingdom. The land here represents the deep richness of the faith that astonishes the soul. It is powerful and fulfilling, filled with purpose and a positive, life-affirming structure. The one thing that it is not is complicated. The business of this kingdom is quite simple. Do not mistake the richness of color and exhilarating variety for unnecessary complexity.
The axiom of the spiritual life is that simplicity is the fertile ground for authentic spiritual awareness and growth. The landscape I am presenting to you is just that, simple. But in its simplicity, it is filled with variety and wonder. There is no better description of what I mean here than that given by our powerful little friend St. Thérèse of Lisieux:
“(Jesus) opened the book of nature before me, and I saw that every flower he has created has a beauty of its own, that the splendor of the rose and the lily’s whiteness do not deprive the violet of its scent nor make less ravishing the daisy’s charm. I saw that if every little flower wished to be a rose, Nature would lose her spring adornments, and the fields would be no longer enameled with their varied flowers.”
“So, it is in the world of souls, the living garden of the Lord. It pleases him to create great saints, who may be compared with the lily’s or the rose; but he also created little ones, who must be content to be daisies or violets, nestling at his feet to delight his eyes when he should choose to look at them. The happier they are to be as he wills, the more perfect they are.”[2]
Thérèse puts it quite beautifully. I discovered simplicity and richness of content and meaning in this land. In other words, I found fulfillment.
Let us now continue to imagine this scene that opens before us as the mist begins to rise and disappear. Is there anything about the gradual enlightenment and forthcoming visual development that speaks to you of complexity or confusion? No. A beautiful landscape comes to life in all the colors of the rainbow and in a spirit of unity and integrity. Everything fits together. Unity immersed in a variety of detail elevates and illuminates the panorama. This is Catholic spirituality. The saints and pathways are hidden from us here on earth as the mist hides the landscape in our contemplation. The journey ever deeper into the land of Catholic spirituality is akin to having the sunlight break forth and dissipate the mist in marvelous wonderment.
I will give you another example to drive home the point I am making here about the simplicity and richness of the Catholic journey. This is from a different field of study. This idea and image come from the physicist Albert Einstein. With the help of a Jesuit priest, Einstein determined how the universe came into being with the Big Bang and how all the laws of the physical universe, including time itself, came into being with it.
The astonishingly simple formula E=MC^2 drove the creation of the universe and all of its complex laws. The incredible variety and beauty of the material universe resulted from that simple concept. Variety and richness driven by a spirit of simplicity are the foundation for both the physical and the spiritual cosmos. In other words, both Catholic spirituality and science testify that there is unity between the material and spiritual worlds. This unity could only be inspired by a unified Creator God, one who is, as a Trinity, both rich in variety and unified in his singular totality. I have come to the joy emanating from this beautiful richness and serene simplicity through my journey in Catholic spirituality.
How can such simplicity of spirit survive this magnificent variety without being lost in it to the point of becoming confusing, complex, or even quarrelsome? This works well while soaking in a beautiful landscape, but what practical value does it bring us daily in a world filled with diverse and sometimes competing cultures and customs? How is a unified, living kingdom built with such richness and variety? Put succinctly, how does a universal kingdom, simple yet rich and complete, become a reality?
The key to building a majestic kingdom is establishing it on an objective, universal spirit that gives birth to authentic, objective values. Those civilizations and societies that work to develop the very structures of their culture from a sense of unified purpose enjoy simple living while simultaneously creating marvelous works of art. To be fully and authentically unified across all the world's cultures, that unity must be based on universal and absolute principles that are honored across all those cultures in their proper and authentic hierarchical order.
I propose that this is what Christ has done in bringing us his kingdom. The universal unity of humanity he restores to us after the disunity brought about by our first parents is founded on God as God reveals himself to us through Christ himself. When all humanity accepts the authority of Jesus Christ, we shall have the foundation for restoring true brotherhood and progress. The well-meaning notion that we should "get along" never seems to be recognized by the universal citizenry as acceptable or noble enough of an objective. We must look to something more than this world to find unity for the whole world. And it is about just this business of what is "more than this world" that humanity cannot agree.
No wonder we never seem to find brotherhood. I will suggest that Jesus Christ is the only person to walk the face of the earth to give us that "something" and even give us an institutional structure to support it. The Church still today testifies to this marvelous and lasting work of Jesus Christ. The Church is universal from Africa to Asia, North to South America, and Australia. Local cultures are respected, while the people of all these lands are unified through Christ in the Church. The Church is the living model for brotherhood. Jesus' kingdom is founded on the authentic hierarchy of values, and, as a result, it masters simplicity, variety, and unity.
Interestingly, Christendom in the Middle Ages was not concerned with race, tongue, or nation, for the nation-states were only beginning to take shape. The elevation of the state as the primary source of devotion to the Church was still centuries away when the anti-Church philosophers would propose new gods for the people. The individual kingdoms before then were ruled by continuity of faith and obedience to the Church. When the Crusaders fought to defend their land and culture from the threat of the newly emerging and aggressive Mohammedans, they came together as one group speaking every kind of tongue in the land. They were unified in their variety. We tend to think today that the United States is the most significant historical example of a unified melting pot. This is not necessarily so when compared to Christendom. And Christendom lasted for roughly one thousand years before the Protestant Revolution shattered that civilization.
I think we are getting to an essential secret here, one that is found early on in the March of Hope as we travel through the land of Catholicism. This is very important. The world is desperately seeking unity. But the world is simultaneously demanding a radical, prideful individualism that sweeps God and religion aside so that man may worship himself and pursue his own truth.
Our current culture discounts any idea that there is an authentic order to values in our universe, such as the notion that there is an objective, personal Creator God who should be first worshiped and his laws willingly obeyed. This is driving more and more disunity in humanity. Without any moral objectivity as a foundation, the modern culture forces an inauthentic and superficial unity on society through political correctness, whereby no one may dare say anything is right or wrong. The world seeks to reduce humanity to the lowest common denominator of spiritual life, to shade the panoramic landscape in only a dull grey, while handing them grey peasants' suits so they may be "unified."
Not so in Christ's kingdom. His kingdom brings freedom, variety, creativity, and all the beauty of that landscape because the inhabitants are unified by the simple notion that God, as he reveals himself through his only son Jesus Christ, is to be first worshiped. This is fatally not true in the kingdom of the world, where humanity is torn into a bickering pluralism whereby the one interest group with the most power rules the rest. First, one group forces its agenda, then another tomorrow. The only way to find unity is to reduce everyone to the spiritual communism described above. God is only a subjective experience there, a good description of today's Western world's creed.
The 20th-century theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand spoke poignantly of the negative impact on humanity brought about by this confusion and disunity found in modern culture:
“The Gospel intends us to attain to true simplicity: simplicity in the sense of an inward unity of life. Such a simplicity contrasts, in the first place, with the disunity in the soul of those whose lives are filled, now by one thing, now by another; who lose themselves in the motley variegation of life, who do not seek for an integration of their actions and conduct by one dominant principle…a person of this kind is said to be split; his life lacks inward unity.”[3]
In stark opposition to this situation, the citizens in the kingdom of God have this inward unity. Therefore, they are outwardly united by one dominant principle, which is the truly authentic one. Everyone there worships the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who has revealed himself as the I AM.
One of the early and great blessings bestowed on me in my March of Hope came from this realization of the source of unified culture in this new kingdom. I quickly sensed in my new spiritual direction the need to simplify my interior life in subjugation to the dominant principle of Jesus Christ and to eliminate from it the disintegrated confusion of the angry world.
First and foremost, I took television, movies, and modern music out of my life as much as possible in this media-addicted society. The entertainment industry is in the hands of the evil dictator; there can be no doubt about that. Everything that spews forth from that industry is geared to disrupt the simplicity and quiet serenity of your spiritual life. You cannot develop an authentic interior life that leads to union with Jesus Christ while absorbing the entertainment industry's twenty-four-hour noise and blasphemous philosophies. The business of that culture comes straight from hell. If you cannot break free from it, you will never find the kingdom of which I speak. Be careful about striking a deal with the modern culture on your journey in the faith. “But since you are neither hot nor cold, but only lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth.”[4]
Simplicity, grounded in worshiping God first and excluding the noise of the vulgar world, was the prerequisite for moving forward on my journey and that which would allow the mist to rise over the incredible panoramic landscape. The view I received from our Lord and Our Lady in return for giving up that world is of such wonder and joy! When you give up the world for Christ, you not only receive the blessing of simplicity, beauty, and unity in a kingdom far nobler than anything you have imagined, you receive a hundred-fold in return.
“Jesus said, ‘In truth I tell you, there is no one who has left house, brothers, sisters, mother, father, children or land for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundred times as much, houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and land – and persecutions too – now in this present time and, in the world to come, eternal life.”[5]
Jesus Christ is the secret to the richness of variety and the serene simplicity of the kingdom. He is the sum of all proper principles and values. The only authentic principle around which to be unified is Jesus Christ in his objective, resurrected truth. This is how the beautiful landscape that is the kingdom of heaven exists in such panoramic beauty.
We made a bold, courageous step into the simplicity, richness, and unity of an authentic, dominant principle, namely, the person of Jesus Christ as true God and man. Let us continue with how I have come to receive my hundred-fold return of brothers, sisters, and land from him in exchange for giving up the world.
[1]1 Corinthians 13:12 (New Jerusalem)
[2] St. Thérèse of Lisieux, translated by Michel Day. (1951). The Story of a Soul; The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc. P.2.
[3] Von Hildebrand, Dietrich (1948). Transformation in Christ. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, P.71.
[4] Revelation 3:16 (New Jerusalem).
[5] Mark 10: 29-30 (New Jerusalem)