Why we have Lost God
The Primacy of Matter
and
the Loss of Faith
We live in a world of matter
Matter is the substance of the senses. It is apprehensible.
We touch it, feel it, manipulate it, make things of it, and even
destroy it (yes, I know the principle of “the conservation of
matter,” but you get the point.) It is tactile, sensuous, and often
pleasing to the eye, the touch, and our other senses. It alternately
excites us and repels us. It is what we see when we open our eyes,
what we feel when we touch anything.
It is the world we know
Increasingly, it is the only world we know.
Every other “possible world” has receded before the incursion of the
senses and the accompanying demand for instantaneity: pleasure
now, satisfaction now, information now,
fulfillment now — and on a broader level, peace now,
justice now and equality now. We have all heard the
political and social mantra that first came to us from the
tumultuous and purple-hazed 60’s by now, and we even know its
cadence. The “cause” matters not, for the response has by now become
childishly reflexive:
1.
“What
do we want?” (insert anything here)
2.
“When
do we want it?
3.
“Now!”
4.
“What
do we want?”
And so on. Again and again, as if repetition will
somehow produce what we want when we cannot obtain it through reason
or persuasion. After all, it worked when we were spoiled children —
who, largely, have grown into spoiled adults. Our parents,
regrettably, had taught us by example; by collapsing before the
incessant cries, not for what we needed (which they always
provided), but for what we wanted. We learned that, by making
their lives miserable, they would acquiesce to what we wanted — and
demanded!
Do you want anything — however absurd? Then agitate, demand, and
never take “no” for an answer, however unimpeachable the
authority. Not even from God Himself. We want to “feel”
justified, to be “affirmed” in our childish petulance —and if we are
denied our desires, then we will legislate them, find
some obscure or unbalanced “academic” to “authenticate” us, a
celebrity “in solidarity” with our grievance to publicize us, and a
venal politician to “empower” us … until our desires become
our laws.
Hence, we find that politics is the venue of power, not mind.
Hollywood is the venue of entertainment, not reality
which is only discernible through the mind and that
inconvenient faculty called reason that we abhor because it
defies us.
The Parallax of Reason ... and Sensation
We do not want reason. We do not want mind. We want
sensation — the stimulation and the satisfaction of the senses!
What have we to do with inflexible reason? With God? With things
less than rhapsodic, with lasting concepts … even purported
everlasting realities … with the deliverances of anything devoid of
tactility, before the contempt of the court of immediacy that
governs the senses?
We ourselves are composed of matter — we recognize this even if we
have forgotten that it is only half the equation of our being human.
The other half is spirit … the immaterial soul which is not
apprehensible by the senses, only by the mind, a concept perhaps
best expressed in the German noun, “Geist” that alternately denotes,
“the mind,” “the psyche,” “spirit,” “soul,” (and even
“ghost.”)
We are profoundly more than our appetites, just as God is profoundly
more than the mind’s conception of Him. Eternity extends before us —
and we instinctively know it … but we treat it as we treat time:
passing, changing, mutable, pliable to our desires. And for a while
it is so.
But we know that it will not always be so. We sense “ending”. We
intuit that there is a terminus to our being in time and that
something must lie beyond it — even if it is the skeptic's cold,
sterile, embalmed "nothing" that we nevertheless irresistibly
perceive as something in what we persist in describing as
“nothingness”. Because we are permeated with time and insensible
(and this is not the same as “inapprehensible”) to the eternal, we
even perceive “nothingness” — despite our insistence that it is
otherwise — as somehow perduring. It is a tentative state of utter
suspension — even while we declare that nothing is suspended.
When we lost God — whenever that might have been — we lost our
raison d'être. We do not know it because we refuse to confront it
and we do not confront it because we have not known God, or once
having known Him have repudiated Him, even denied Him, in favor of
our own temporal desires which, like their objects in space and
time, will surely pass. Only God remains. History testifies to
this.
Desistite, et agnoscite me Deum: “Be still and know that I am
God!”
Our restlessness is both an invitation by God and a testimony
to our blindness apart from Him.
Geoffrey K.
Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
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editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
Totally Faithful to the Sacred Deposit of
Faith entrusted to the Holy See in Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti
verbum Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have but little power,
and yet you have kept My word, and have not denied My
Name.”
(Apocalypse 3.8)
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