Catholic Faith and Reflections

The word idolatry is one of those old sounding words often relegated to the archives of history. Many of us don’t associate idolatry with contemporary culture, thinking of it as something of the past, kind of “Old Testament stuff.”

I think it is alive and well in our world today.

Idolatry is the worship of a created object or being, as if it were a god.

Idols in today’s world are ubiquitous. How often have you spoken to individuals who stand in awe and reverence to the gods of money, land, house, health, or occupation?

Perhaps the most insidious form I have encountered is the tendency to make God into our image. In effect, we make ourselves idols. 

We all have been taught, and hopefully believe, that we are made in God’s image and likeness. We share in divine life. We resemble God in our ability to think and will the good for ourselves and others. We share in God’s creative power by bringing new life into the world. We have the ability to reach out and form intimate relationships and thus share in the Trinitarian life. We share in God’s authority over other created beings and things. It is God’s image that is reflected in us. 

How often have you heard others try to give God human attributes (characteristics)? When we do that, we divide God, we limit God, we define God, and we place God in opposition to others and to God’s nature. God is One, and is infinitely great. God has perfect nature, without division or disunity. We cannot anthropomorphize divine nature. God is so infinitely different from us, i.e., transcendent, that we cannot comprehend it.

As one of my earliest theology professors said, “We know more about what God isn’t than what He is.”

If we fall into the trap of making God into our image and likeness, we fall into idolatry. We cannot create God. We can only experience and receive God in the divine self-revelation in salvation history, in Scripture, and in the living Tradition of the Church.

Yes, God is revealed in the daily events of our lives; we can come to recognize God in creation; we can come to know God in the lives of those around us, but that is because these events, these lives bear some faint resemblance of God’s image and likeness.

It is true that God assumed human nature in the Incarnation and Ascension into heaven of Jesus, God’s Son, but this is all God’s doing. God divinizes us in doing so, i.e., making us holy as God is holy. Jesus is God and (a) Man. With the Incarnation, God came to live within us intimately, closer to us than we are to ourselves. This is a reflection of the divine image in us.

If you really want to know God, look to Jesus and look to the Church, the Body of Christ.

Perhaps most characteristic of Christianity is the doctrine of the Trinity: God is one, yet three Persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Of course, the center of our Christian experience is Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Mary, the Incarnate God, the Word made visible, the long-awaited Messiah, the Son of Man, the Lamb slain for our offenses who is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the center of our Christian experience because it was in his person that God walked on this earth and is now taken up into heaven so that we, like Him, will one day be with Him for all eternity.

Have you ever, though, listened at Mass and realized how the Sacrifice of the Mass is offered to the Father? Our prayer is directed to the Father, through the Son. The Lord’s prayer is directed to the Father. All that Jesus did, and continues to do, is done with the Father, directed to the Father and in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Our Eastern Rite Catholic brother and sisters have a deep awareness and appreciation for the Holy Spirit and in their liturgies are drawn up into the mystery of the Trinity. Their icons depict the Trinity. Their ecclesiastical apparel and the design of their churches draw one up into this mystery.

We in the Latin Rite often, I think, fail to develop a visceral understanding, or should I say, experience, of the Trinity. We have a gut sense of who Jesus is. We have only a ephemeral notion of the Holy Spirit (except, perhaps, a gifted few). Our experience of the Father is whatever our experience was of our own fathers.

I wonder if we are able to put it all together into a unified sense of the Trinity as Father, Son and Spirit. Part of what is inhibiting us is a declining sense of reverence and awe in our daily lives and even in the liturgical life of many Catholics. How can we approach a mystery as deep as the Trinity if we do not have a consistent experience of reverence and awe, a liturgical culture that fosters this, a well developed experience of quiet and rest, and a lived commitment to someone or something greater and more important that “me”?

When we are baptized, we are baptized into the Trinitarian life. If we die in a state of grace and purified of all stain, we will be taken up into the glory of the Triune God.

Let us do what we can, starting today, to develop a sense of awe and wonder, as spirit of reverence in our lives. The Holy Spirit will assist us here. Let us meditate upon, and enter into, the great mystery of the Trinity.