Coffee Talk Redux is a reflection on things God is teaching me. In some cases the ideas for these topics may arise from some conversation I may have had with someone, or a thought that crossed my mind, something I have written, or perhaps something I read somewhere, or maybe a combination of all of these. In any case think of this as a discussion on what God is teaching us to help us grow in our understanding of His will for us.
For our life to be fruitful and joyful we must live a life in the Spirit of the resurrected Christ, a life in His truth. Gaudium de Veritate, our Joy is from the Truth that is found in Christ. To bear this fruit of joy we need water and that water is the living water of the truth of Jesus Christ. Jesus at the well with the Samaritan woman likens His truth to His living water when He tells her in John 4:13-14, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Jesus is telling the woman and us as well today wherein the truth lies. The truth is not in the ways of the world as in the water from the well, but the real or absolute truth is in the living water found in Christ. The Samaritan woman recognizes that her thirst will only be quenched by the truth found in Christ. She says in verse 15, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.” Jesus then reveals to the Samaritan woman that He is the truth when He says to her in John 4:23-26, “But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and Truth, for such the Father seeks to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and Truth… I who speak to you am He,” that is the Messiah the one known as the Christ, the one who is the Truth. The truth for man is to live in this Trinitarian life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That is man is to be trinified and made a member of the Body of Christ through a process of continuous conversion that shapes his conscience through humility, repentance, and obedience. This story about the living water from the Gospel of John is a compelling witness to the truth that is only found through Christ.
When the Hour of His Passion has finally come the Apostle John recounts that when Jesus was brought before Pilate He says to him in John 18:37, “for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” A puzzled Pilate then asks Jesus a simple but yet a very profound question, “What is truth?” Pilate as a pagan is wondering how is man to know or to even recognize the truth? This is a question that an even more confused world continues to ask even to this day.
However, Jesus tells us where the truth lies. Jesus says in John 14:6 that “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” Clearly Christ is saying that man is of the truth when he hears the voice of Christ and follows the way of Christ that leads to eternal life in the Father. However, the challenge for man today is recognizing that the truth is in fact found in Christ. Man because of his free will has a choice to make. Is the truth he seeks found within the world or does the truth transcend creation? Christ is saying that man can be of the truth if he can drown out the cacophony of the world and listen within himself for that voice of truth from Christ that resounds within him. This truth that is found in Christ resides within man as his conscience, which is the eternal voice of Christ.
Having a correctly informed conscience means to know the truth that is in Christ. To know the truth is to discover that man has embedded within his created nature a conscience that is the very image of Christ. Pope Paul VI says of this in Gaudium et Spes (16) that “man has in his heart a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of man… Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with God, Whose voice echoes in his depths.” Man’s conscience guides his conduct to a freedom for excellence that leads to a Gospel of Life from the New Law that promotes, protects, and respects that life which owes its very existence to the creative act of God. Through his conscience that bears the creative mark of God man is able at any decisive moment to do what is right and to avoid evil. Pope John Paul II in his Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor (54) teaches about the connection between man’s conscience and his freedom when he says, “The relationship between man’s freedom and God’s law is most deeply lived out in the ‘heart’ of the person, in his moral conscience.” As an embodied creature of body and soul this “heart” of man is where his soul abides. The challenge for man is then to awaken his soul to the presence of the voice of God that is his conscience.
John in his Gospel is showing in these separate encounters between Christ and the Samaritan woman and Christ with Pilate that He is the truth. To seek truth anywhere else is to fall into a state of despair rather than that eternal joy that Christ is leading one to. The truth and our freedom is then this New Law of the Gospel where our salvation is through our faith in the risen Christ by the grace of the Holy Spirit acting within our hearts. This is the truth that sets us free. Our freedom is in our choice of Christ and His promise of eternal life that has removed us from our bondage and slavery to sin. John says this in his first letter where he recognizes that man is a fallen creature and prone to walk in the darkness even though the light of truth is found in God. In 1 John 1:6 he says, “If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; but if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.” John is basically telling us to listen to God as He speaks in our conscience and to follow His Greatest Commandment (cf. Matthew 22:37-38) which is to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul and for His sake to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
John in his Letter is also saying that Christ died for all of man’s sins and He was resurrected by the power of the Holy Spirit to conquer sin and death. In this way man can be saved and no longer live his life in darkness but become a member of the Body of Christ. It is our own sins throughout the ages that have nailed Christ to the Cross. However, man can only understand that he is culpable in this through the action of the Holy Spirit. Jesus says in John 16:8 that the Holy Spirit, “when He comes… will convince the world of sin.” Man realizes and becomes convinced by the Holy Spirit that he is responsible by his sins for the death of Christ in whose image man was created. It is also only through the power of the Holy Spirit working on man’s conscience that he becomes aware of his own responsibility for all of the sin that is in the world. Pope John Paul II in Dominum et Vivificantem (32) says, “By convincing the ‘world’ concerning the sin of Golgotha…the death of the innocent Lamb…the Holy Spirit also convinces of every sin, committed in any place and at any moment in human history.” Through the Holy Spirit working on man’s conscience “the ‘convincing’ is the demonstration of the evil of sin, of every sin, in relation to the Cross of Christ.” This is part of the mystery of evil and sin, what Pope John Paul II calls the mysterium iniquitatis, that man is ignorant of sin or evil unless the Holy Spirit presents it in the context of Christ on the Cross to man’s conscience.
John continues in his first letter saying in 1 John 2:3-6, “And by this we may be sure that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He who says ‘I know Him’ but disobeys His commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps His Word, in him truly love for God is perfected. By this we may be sure that we are in Him: He who says He abides in Him ought to walk in the same way in which He walked.” To love God is then to follow His commandments, what is also known as the natural law, which is man’s participation in God’s Divine Providence or eternal law. Man through “the judgment of his conscience… perceives and recognizes the prescriptions of the divine law (CCC 1778).” The primary precepts of God’s natural law were revealed to us through Moses as the Ten Commandments or the Decalogue. To walk with Christ means to carry His Cross in our own lives and to follow His Truth and His commandments. This means that we recognize that He lives within us through the grace of His Holy Spirit. Truth is not relative, but truth is absolute as God reveals it to us through His commandments and by His Son Jesus Christ. This absolute truth that comes from God’s natural law is written in man’s conscience and “it is important for every person to be sufficiently present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience. This requirement of interiority is all the more necessary as life often distracts us from any reflection, self-examination or introspection (CCC 1779).” Pope John Paul II (VS 57) recognizes this interiority and says “conscience in a certain sense confronts man with the law, and thus becomes a ‘witness’ for man: a witness of his own faithfulness or unfaithfulness with regard to the law… Conscience is the only witness, since what takes place in the heart of a person is hidden from the eyes of everyone outside.” In this respect it is important to understand that conscience (VS 60) “does not establish the law; rather it bears witness to the authority of the natural law.”
However, our world today no longer views truth as being absolute or transcendent, for most folks in today’s world truth is relative, as Pilate says What is truth? This subjective view of truth is the greatest moral crisis of our time. This moral subjectivity means that for many people they have an incorrectly informed conscience in the sense that their conscience does not conform to God’s objective moral standard that transcends their own personal beliefs. In other words they are not letting the Holy Spirit convince them of their sin. The truth is that today there is an almost complete breakdown in what the truth is which leads to a breakdown in morality, a loss as we have today of God’s objective moral standard. The challenge is not so much that someone may break some accepted moral code but that today we have simply a loss of any moral sense, in other words a tendency to justify our human actions on the basis of our own self-indulgent pursuit of pleasure, possessions, pride, and power; to be our own god with the result that if it feels good then do it.
So morality is now seen by many as just a funality rather than the finality of the ultimate goodness and happiness that is found in God through faith in Christ. We are constantly told by the media and their advertisers that the new truth is this new morality of indifference, that is to be with the in crowd of the world means that this is where our happiness is to be found. In this new moral relativism of indifference any moral standard is just seen as being irrelevant or a loss of one’s personal freedom. We are told not to be judgmental or not to impose our values on others as if the Ten Commandments Moses received from God on Mt. Sinai were just optional. In this new freedom rooted in the normless culture of individualism one no longer has any concern for the other or the common good. Justice is all about one’s own rights with no concern for the duties to the other person as a member of a society or for the common good. Christ becomes nominal as well, just another good guy with something to say but not necessarily for me, especially if it costs me my freedom or a few bucks. All of this points to a real religious or spiritual crisis in the sense that man no longer sees a higher law or power, man no longer sees that there is a God and His absolute truth that serves as our guide out of the morass we constantly find ourselves in. This is what is meant in Genesis 3:5 when Satan as the serpent says to Eve “and you will be like God.” This is what man wants in this new morality of individualism, to be free of his Creator, free of His natural law, and to be his own master.
This is also a morality based more on consequences or consequentialism (VS 75) in the sense that the goodness of a human act is ordered to the end and its consequences and that the end justifies the means. In other words good and bad are just relative terms. The goodness or badness of a human action is evaluated in terms of the consequences. This moral subjectivism even becomes more sophisticated as proportionalism when one evaluates a moral decision on the basis of the proportion between good and evil outcomes (VS 75), “with a view to the ‘greater good’ or ‘lesser evil’ actually possible in a particular situation.” In either of these cases morality is no longer based on an external objective standard of goodness but on the whims of one’s own subjective view of a given situation. This is also known as situationalism wherein morality is grounded in the present moment with no connection to past or future, or to the truth found in God’s natural law that is reflected in man’s conscience.
Consequentialism and proportionalism are known as teleological ethical theories. These theories argue (VS 75), “it is never possible to formulate an absolute prohibition of particular kinds of behavior.” They both lead man into the grave error of conscience wherein one believes that there are no intrinsically evil acts. However, “reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature (VS 80) ‘incapable of being ordered’ to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image.” Hence there are human acts that are against God’s natural law and therefore intrinsically evil. Therefore (VS 81), “circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil by virtue of its object into an act ‘subjectively’ good or defensible as a choice.”
Today man wants to live as if there is no God. God has been replaced with a (EV 23) “practical materialism, which breeds individualism, utilitarianism, and hedonism.” Man finds his new freedom in this practical materialism of a life focused on having and serving his personal well-being while ignoring the essence of his being, the fact that he is made in the image of God. The very idea of suffering (EV 23), “an inescapable burden of human existence…is ‘censored,’ rejected as useless, indeed opposed as an evil always and in every way to be avoided.” Man no longer sees any value in suffering or death and misses that hope that is found in Christ, that there is a (EV 97) “door which opens wide on eternity and, for those who live in Christ, an experience of participation in the mystery of his death and resurrection.” As a result of this rejection of God man’s moral conscience becomes confused and quality of life is all that matters to him with the result that the weakest members of society are either exploited or seen to be a burden. Man then leads himself into a culture of death confusing evil with good and institutionalizing sin in such a way that man loses his sense that there is a fundamental right to life. Paul in Romans 1:25 says this confusion occurs, “because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”
Pope John Paul II says that today (EV 28), “we are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the ‘culture of death’ and the ‘culture of life’…with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life.” Nourished by our faith in Christ and His Gospel of Life we are called through our conscience to choose the culture of life. Man is made in the image of God and (EV 34) “is a manifestation of God in the world, a sign of his presence, a trace of his glory.” Life is a gift from God and the commandment You shall not kill tells man that life is sacred and inviolable, that (EV 40) “his own life and that of others – [is] something which does not belong to him, because it is the property and gift of God the Creator and Father.” Man’s very dignity and sense of justice and charity comes from this commandment not to kill.
Pope John Paul II teaches (EV 57) “the deliberate decision to deprive an innocent human being of his life is always morally evil and can never be licit either as an end in itself or as a means to a good end.” This applies especially to those in our society that are the weakest and the most vulnerable and includes “a fetus or an embryo, an infant or an adult, an old person, or one suffering from an incurable disease, or a person who is dying.” A culture of life recognizes that human life as a gift from God is to be respected regardless of its stage of development. It is through God’s commandments that man learns what it means to live in a culture of life. These commandments of God (Ev 75) “make it clear that the choice of certain ways of acting is radically incompatible with the love of God and with the dignity of the person created in his image.” When considered in the context of the love that Christ showed for man by His sacrifice on the Cross, man can begin to understand the example that Christ showed us in that, “by this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren (1 John 3:16).” This means that for the Christian this (EV 77) “involves an absolute imperative to respect, love, and promote the life of every brother and sister, in accordance with the requirements of God’s bountiful love in Jesus Christ.”
This means that for man to embrace a culture of life he must actively develop his conscience according to the Gospel of Life. Man needs to recognize the (EV 96) “essential connection between life and freedom… the incomparable and inviolable worth of every human life.” This formation of man’s conscience must also recognize the intimate link between freedom and truth. Man’s freedom is dependent on his recognition that there is an objective moral order or an objective truth that transcends his tendency to create his own truth thereby succumbing to that mistaken freedom found in indifference. Pope John Paul II says, “when freedom is detached from objective truth it becomes impossible to establish personal rights on a firm rational basis; and the ground is laid for society to be at the mercy of the unrestrained will of individuals or the oppressive totalitarianism of public authority.” Man needs to understand that his very humanness is grounded in his faith in God who created him in His image and likeness and saved him from himself through the death and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ. When man loses his sense of connection to God and His natural law he loses his dignity and he loses what it means to be human. Man needs this transcendent principle of God’s natural law and a correctly informed conscience to order his life so that his life cannot in the end be manipulated or controlled by those who walk in the darkness. For without God man no longer sees the truth and he is not free but lives his life in despair. (Ronald L. Fournier © 2009)
