A Bouquet of Love

There are things more than your eyes can see… A man was exploring caves by the seashore when he found a canvas bag containing hardened clay balls. It was as if someone had rolled up some clay and left them out in the sun to bake. The clay balls didn't look like much, but they intrigued the man, so he took the bag with him. As he strolled along the beach to pass the time, he threw the clay balls one by one into the ocean as far as he could. He thought little of it until he dropped one of the balls, which cracked open on a rock. Inside was a beautiful, precious stone. Excited, the man began breaking open the remaining clay balls and found a hidden treasure within each one. He discovered thousands of dollars' worth of jewels in the twenty or so clay balls he had left. Then it struck him. He had thrown maybe fifty or sixty clay balls containing hidden treasure into the ocean waves. Instead of thousands of dollars in treasure, he could have had tens of thousands, but he just threw it all away.  At times, it's like that with people, too, that is, when we look at someone or maybe even ourselves, we tend to see only the external clay vessel. It doesn't look much from the outside or may not always be beautiful and sparkling, and we often regard that person as less important than someone more beautiful or renowned. But if you take time to get to know that person and if you ask the Holy Spirit to show you that person the way He sees them, then the brilliant gem begins to shine forth. The beauty of friendship goes beyond just a helping hand, a warm smile, or the joy of spending time together. It truly shines when you realize that someone believes in you and is ready to share their trust and friendship with you. Look Inside Each one of us is truly God's wonderful creation. He created each of us in His image and endowed each person with unique abilities. To unravel the inner beauty from the depths of our souls, we need to be touched by the true and unconditional love that will radically transform us into our true selves. That genuine and unconditional love comes first from God, who has loved humanity from all eternity, even before the creation of the universe, and that love has always been given to us through God's beloved Son, Jesus Christ. Through His self-sacrificing love, God's only-begotten Son shed His blood for the redemption of humanity and to atone for our sins so that we might be reconciled with God. Beauty is like a precious jewel that will shine daily through our good actions for others and our authentic lives. We should be able to realize the beauty and nobility in the very hearts of others, given by God himself when He placed us in this universe. Only true and unconditional love can inspire and transform us into people who know how to live for others and are ready to commit themselves to selfless service.

I have been reading, with both profit and delight, Thomas Joseph White’s latest book: The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology. Father White, one of the brightest of a new generation of Thomas interpreters, explores a range of topics in this text—the relationship between Jesus’ human and divine natures, whether the Lord experienced the beatific vision, the theological significance of Christ’s cry of anguish on the cross, His descent into Hell, etc.—but for the purposes of this article, I want to focus on a theme of particular significance in the theological and catechetical context today. Father White argues that the classical tradition of Christology, with its roots in the texts of the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul, understood Jesus ontologically, that is to say, in terms of His fundamental being or existential identity; whereas modern and contemporary Christology tends to understand Jesus psychologically or relationally. And though this distinction seems, prima facie, rather arcane, it has tremendous significance for our preaching, teaching, and evangelizing.  In the famous scene at Caesarea-Philippi, Jesus turns to His Apostles and asks: “Who do people say that I am?” He doesn’t ask what people are saying about His preaching or His miracle-working or His impact on the culture; He asks who they say He is. Saint John’s Gospel commences with a magnificent assertion regarding, not the teaching of the Lord, but rather His being: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…and the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us.” In his letter to the Philippians, Saint Paul writes: “Though He was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped at,” implying thereby an ontological identity between Jesus and the God of Israel.  Following these prompts—and there are many others in the New Testament—the great theological tradition continued to speculate about the ontology of the Founder. Councils from Nicea to Chalcedon formulated ever more precise articulations of the being, nature, and person of Jesus, and the most significant theologians of the early centuries—Origen, Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Augustine, etc.—tirelessly speculated about these same matters. This preoccupation with the being of Jesus signals, by the way, a major point of demarcation between Christianity and the other great religions of the world. Buddhists are massively interested in the teaching of the Buddha, but they are more or less indifferent to the ontology of the Buddha; no self-respecting Muslim worries about the existential make-up of Muhammad; and no Jew is preoccupied with the ‘being’ of Moses or Abraham. Father White points out that the time-honored practice of ontological speculation regarding Jesus comes to a kind of climax with the meticulously nuanced teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the High Middle Ages.  However, commencing in the eighteenth century with the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christology took a decisive turn. Attempting to make the claims of the Christian faith more intelligible to a modern audience, Schleiermacher explained the Incarnation in terms of Jesus’ relationship to and awareness of God. Here is a particularly clear articulation of his position: “The Redeemer, then, is like all men in virtue of the identity of human nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of His God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him.” Armies of theologians—both Protestant and Catholic—have raced down the Schleiermacher Autobahn these past two hundred years, adopting a ‘consciousness Christology’ rather than an ‘ontological Christology.’ I can testify that my theological training in the seventies and eighties of the last century was very much conditioned by this approach. Father White strenuously insists that this change represents a severe declension in Christian theology, and I think he’s right. The abandonment of an ontological approach has myriad negative consequences, but I will focus on just a few. First, it effectively turns Jesus into a type of super-Saint, different perhaps in degree from other holy people, but not in kind. Hence, on this reading, it is not the least bit clear why Jesus is of any greater significance than other religious figures and founders. If He is a Saint, even a great one, well people can argue so is Confucius, so is the Buddha, so are the Sufi mystics and Hindu sages, and so in their own way are Socrates, Walt Whitman, and Albert Schweitzer. If Jesus mediates the divine to you, well and good, but why should you feel any particular obligation to propose Him to someone else, who is perhaps more moved by a saintly person from another religious tradition? Indeed, if ‘God-consciousness’ is the issue, who are we to say that Jesus’ was any wider or deeper than Saint Francis’ or Mother Teresa’s? In a word, the motivation for real evangelization more or less dissipates when one navigates the Schleiermacher highway. More fundamentally, when the stress is placed on Jesus’ human consciousness of God, the spiritual weight falls overwhelmingly on the side of immanence. What I mean is our quest for God, our search for the divine, and our growth in spiritual awareness become paramount, rather than what God has uniquely accomplished and established. When the Church says that Jesus is God, She means that the divine life, through the graceful intervention of God, has become available to the world in an utterly unique manner. She furthermore means that She herself—in Her preaching, Her formal teaching, in Her sacraments, and in Her Saints—is the privileged vehicle through which this life now flows into human hearts and into the culture. It is easy enough to see that the transition from an ontological Christology to a consciousness Christology has conduced toward all manner of relativism, subjectivism, indifferentism, and the attenuation of evangelical zeal.  One of my constant themes when I was professor and rector at Mundelein Seminary was that ideas have consequences. I realize that much of what Father White discusses in his book can seem hopelessly abstract, but he is in fact putting his finger on a shift that has had a huge impact on the life of the post-conciliar Church.

Are you joyful or glum? Do you find it exciting, or are you just going through the motions? “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son” is the key to and, indeed, the very heart of the Gospel.  The Gospel message is not a slogan or a brand label that distinguishes Christianity from other religions; it is not an idea or a doctrine; it is not a self-help theory to attain happiness. Rather, it is about a person, Jesus himself, whom the Father has given to us so that we might have eternal life. Jesus becomes the source of our joy, the feeling in the soul that comes from the experience of being accompanied and loved every moment of our journey towards our eternal destiny.  God the Father has always looked upon us with love; it’s as though He can’t help Himself because, as the evangelist proclaims in his First Letter: “God is love” (1 John 4:8).  And, for the sake of love, He came among us in the flesh of His only begotten Son. In Jesus, He went in search of us when we were lost following the rebellion against God in the Garden (cf. Genesis 3). In Jesus, He came to raise us when we fell. In Jesus, He weeps with us when we experience crushing loss and heals our wounds. In Jesus, we are never lost; we are always loved.   Boundless Love If hearing about God’s love for you does not expand your heart and make you appreciate the immensity of God’s love for you, one may ask what is going on?! Maybe we prefer a glum, dour Christianity about rules and regulations with its inherent rewards and punishments. Maybe we’re just sad because, to put it bluntly, we’re just self-absorbed even though we profess to be disciples of Jesus. If that’s the case, we then need to hit the pause button and really listen to the Good News, on a daily basis.  God loves you so much that He gave His entire life for you. If that doesn’t make you joyful, what more can God do to convince you? In turn, since you are made in the image of God, who is Love, this surely means we are most human when we love.  That is the key to understanding your life, which is no longer about you, but about God, who is self-giving generosity.  It is awesome to witness elderly couples who love each other so much that they give their lives to each other ‘until death do we part.’  They get it! In the end, it’s not how productive we were or how much wealth we generated, or how successful we were; rather, the only thing that really matters is the love that we were able to give and receive.  That is God’s stuff!

Hollywood actress Diana Rein opens up about how her life changed drastically when she discovered her life’s purpose. I was three when we migrated from Romania to the United States. Although my dad was a music professor in Romania, he took the job of a janitor when we moved here, and my mom took one at the Drake Hotel. It was my parents who initially noticed my growing interest in the arts. As a very creative little girl with a love for music and a flair for comedy, I thought I would be a comedian one day.  At 11, while I was narrating the book Snowman Who Wanted To Meet July in a studio in Chicago, the producer of the show asked me if I had ever thought about acting. He later introduced me to an agency that sent me for an acting audition, which booked me for Home Alone. They announced it over the intercom at school, and it was a wow moment for me. When I entered the sets of Home Alone, I saw what this world was like with lights, cameras, and craft services…It all felt like a dream moment for me. The money I made from the movie really helped my family, and I thought that if I kept going, I could continue to help my family. I thought this was my destiny, and I soon moved to California with Hollywood dreams. My parents believed in my plans and let me apply to the BFA acting program(Bachelor of Fine Arts) in a college there, though I knew that this meant going home only for Christmas and Summer. I was so driven that I felt my talent would take me to higher places, and I knew this was my purpose. But after three years, I had to leave school as my family couldn’t afford it anymore. I stayed in Los Angeles and went to auditions. I was all set to recreate that feeling I got when I walked into the Home Alone sets, but it was just an uphill climb. There were opportunities, but I didn't go for them as I felt that they were not the right ones. Soon, I really felt lost. In those days, I began going to bookshops and got indulged in metaphysical, quantum-physics crystals, and everything else, but not Christianity. It was like being on a different road all the time. I thought that what the culture deemed successful was the right way, but it only made me struggle more.   A Second Shot After about five years, I asked my parents to come and take me home, and right before I left California, my aunt's stepson contacted me. I was very reluctant to talk to him at first, but I noticed that there was just goodness in his soul, and he was talking a lot about Jesus and wanted to help my family. I found out that he was going to a Christian church, and there was just something about him that inspired me. I moved back to Chicago with my parents and started going to a Christian church, where I became a part of the choir. Things went fine for a while. Then I went to a birthday party for my friend in the city where I met my husband-to-be. After we got married, I convinced my husband to move to Los Angeles because I still had this unfulfilled dream. The whole time I was in Chicago, I was actually dreaming about living in Los Angeles. I seriously felt that I could have a second shot. But while we lived in Los Angeles, we felt disconnected and did separate things. I had written, filmed, and produced a short film, Gypsy Gift, just before I had my son. The moment I held him turned out to be a wow moment for me, and it changed my whole perspective. However, I didn't quite change because I still felt like I needed to succeed at something and be a role model for him. That’s when my music career began. While my mom watched over my child for three hours, I learned how to record, mix, and edit music. Finally, I made my own album called Long Road in 2015 and released it in 2016.  Lost Identity Every musician’s dream is to get signed to a label, and I got it with my next album, Queen of My Castle, for which I got the blues label. I felt like I was reaching my dream of winning awards and going on a music tour. We went on a five-week tour in a van, and I had to leave my son with my mother, which was heartbreaking. Right into the third week of the pandemic, COVID stopped us, and we had to go back home. Though I was happy that I could see my son, I had to wait in quarantine for about two weeks. In the meantime, I did Facebook Live with my music, but strangely, I felt isolated. I began questioning things, and that's when the seeds planted earlier in life started gaining ground for my real relationship with Jesus. I began reading the Bible and also at the same time, I started praying. I felt my musical identity was shattered, and I didn't see a purpose in it and was not willing to travel anymore. However, I wanted to create a happy environment for my son. I bought a record player, and I still remember playing a Christian station all the time. Little by little, we began to learn those songs and ended up going to a Church. God worked through our lives and changed us completely, and God became our foundation. In Him, we put our trust, and we began feeling His guidance in every place. And the biggest comfort is to know that we are never alone. I was striving so hard but with a selfish intention. My heart was transformed from a more selfish heart to a Jesus-driven heart. I wrote my first Christian song, With Every Breath, which echoed my feelings of being lost in the wilderness.  Living His Way I never thought in a million years that I would be doing woodwork. Jesus was a carpenter and it made me feel like I was doing something closer to God. I made wood signs with God's messages and verses on them, and that became my way of sharing God with other people. I realized that my identity is not in what movie I did or what song I did but in Christ.  He gave me a talent for a reason, but I've always used it for self-serving but now it’s completely changed. I now take the back seat while God takes the front seat of my life. Program Article - Jesus my Savior - https://share.shalomworld.org/64e4721138ad710c1a0b3992/episode/Home