January 8, 2011
Solemnity of the Epiphany
Is 60: 1-6; Eph 3: 2-3a, 5-6;
Mt 2: 1-12
As I was growing up we would say the family rosary every night. During the Christmas season we would move into the living room and kneel in front of the Nativity set. When the Epiphany rolled around the three kings would make their appearance with their camel. For a little child, images, figurines, and stories hold such power and can embed themselves in the memory forever. For me, the three kings represented diversity. They were exotic. They didn’t look at all like the other figurines in the set. They obviously came from other nationalities and cultures. But, it was no accident that they were there. It had been planned from all eternity. They were meant to be part of this intimate little scene.
And “diversity” is still a good theme to reflect on even 2,000 years after the Epiphany. There is a lot of room for variety within our Catholic church. As we know, the word itself “catholic” means “universal.” We are big enough to absorb the good in all cultures. We are enriched by that diversity.
Our God is a god who revels in diversity, who delights in it and celebrates it. Just a quick look at his creation will make that perfectly evident. How many species of moths are there? How many types of birds? Our God is no cookie-cutter god. He doesn’t crank things out like bottles from a bottle factory that all look the same. Take for instance the human face. Our creator doesn’t have a lot to work with: a mouth, a nose, eyes. At yet, wherever you go in the world, each one will look a little different. Out of the billions of people who have lived, no two faces have been the same except for maybe identical twins.
It is good for us to find our own type of spirituality. We don’t have to fit a mold. We don’t have to be clones. What works for someone else might not work for us. There is such a range in personality types and individual likes and dislikes. God made each one of us unique and he doesn’t want us to violate our uniqueness. We all have our own unique contribution to make, our own unique role to play.
When one looks at the gamut of canonized saints, one sees such diversity. There are the jokers like St. Philip Neri. He went for awhile with his beard shaved on only one side, and sometimes wore huge, over-sized clown shoes. There are the cerebral types like St. Thomas Aquinas. His
Summa Theologica is still very much respected. There are the simple types like St. Benedict Joseph Labre. He was a bum, a hobo, a derelict, and maybe even a little retarded. He smelled bad. But with the lousy cards he had been dealt in this life, he used them all to be a big winner in the next.
This allowance for diversity within our Church spells out to tolerance and acceptance on our part. Not everybody has to be like us. Things would be pretty boring if they were. St. Paul, using the body as an analogy, asks: “If the body were all eye, how could it hear? If the body were all ear, how could it smell?” (1Cor 12:17).
But at the same time, diversity has its limits. Not everything goes. In society there are laws to demarcate those limits. Without them there would be chaos. Within the Catholic Church there are also parameters. It is like a big circus tent. It can hold a lot of acts and people. But there are walls to that tent. At some point you come to the line where this is outside the tent and this is inside. Without the walls there would be no tent.
Civil law has its guardians. They are our lawyers and judges and courts. They have been trained and are experts in their field. The Catholic Church also has its guardians who protect the sacred deposit of the faith from being contaminated, and who also protect the faithful from being led astray. It is a thankless job, but someone has to do it. Before Benedict XVI was pope, he was the head of that congregation. From time to time they have to step in and tell a theologian that he has crossed the line, that what he is teaching is no longer within the “tent.” Names come to mind like Fr. Hans Kung, Fr. Anthony de Mello, Fr. Charles Curran. Sometimes these theologians retract their positions; sometimes they don’t.
In general, people in our western society are more well-educated than in past centuries. There are more people with doctorates in one field or another. But having a doctorate in one field doesn’t make one an expert in all fields. Some well-educated people today don’t like the Catholic Church telling them how to think. They feel it is oppressive. They want to be able to think for themselves and come to their own decisions. The problem is that some propositions can seem reasonable at first glance or when viewed superficially, but when you follow the trajectory out to its logical conclusions you’re in dangerous waters. Most professionals in our western society don’t have the time or training or resources to thoroughly research some moral or theological issue. Instead, they’ve read some article in a popular magazine where the author gave a spin to what he had to say and left out certain truths that didn’t fit into his agenda. Or else they’ve watched a movie like “The De Vinci Code” and now feel like they’re in a position to discount some of the rules of the Catholic Church that they don’t agree with or find inconvenient.
To truly call oneself a Catholic, one is not free to pick and choose. There’s inside the tent and outside. If you want to be inside the tent you have to accept the whole package. If you want to put yourself outside the tent and admire some of the elements within it, that’s your prerogative. It doesn’t mean that we don’t sometimes struggle with things within the tent. It might take us a while to wrap our brains around some issues and stances and come to understand their logic. It doesn’t mean that things are always going to be neat and tidy within the tent. There will always be scandals. We can’t get away from the human element within the institution of the Church. That goes back all the way to the twelve Apostles. But it doesn’t negate the divine element in our beloved Catholic faith.
And so, on this feast of the Epiphany let us celebrate the amount of diversity in our Catholic heritage, and at the same time be grateful for the structures that keep us from being led astray by false doctrine.
