“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” Mt 7:24-27
How do we build our lives on the rock instead of the shifting sands of the culture around us? How do we keep our compass straight in a world where “north” is declared “south” and even truths and teachings of the Church are skewed to fit peoples’ pet projects?
Msgr. Romano Guardini, the great twentieth century theologian, mentor to Pope Benedict XVI and prolific writer, prophetically summarized the danger of being lost in the modern world while he wrote about the importance of forming and living by a Catholic world view. If we don’t, he says, “We find ourselves, first of all, with a tendency to consider the world—that is, the context of what can be immediately experienced—as the entirety of what is real and relevant, and proceed, exclusively from this presupposition, to respond to the problems of life”
Politics, terrorism, gender ideology, the economy, the media, jobs, decay of the family, school, work challenges, depression, ADHD, aging parents, addiction, failing health, technology and an ever-changing world with threats that reach us from thousands of miles away with one click. Not to mention the ever present media and the 24 hour news cycle. New agendas, marketing and cultural shifts pressure us daily to adjust our living and thinking. To live based in responses to these things is very much building a house on shifting sands.
Instead, all of these screaming realities that demand our reaction and fragment our peace become context instead of foundation when we choose to see the world through Christ’s eyes. They are properly seen as events and elements of our world that we can respond to wisely, instead of letting them reign as the domineering drivers of our thoughts, actions and reactions.
The antidote to modern frenetic group-think is to take a pause, know Christ and learn to see through his eyes, to shape ourselves with an integral Catholic formation and to act from that as our solid rock, as a simple, peaceful and strong sign of contradiction in this domineering culture. This is a Catholic worldview.
Guardini rooted all of this in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament as the healing and blessed experience of Christ where “… things fall into true perspective. Vision sharpens. Much that troubles us rights itself.”
He brought that experience of prayer and closeness to Our Lord into concrete life by insisting on the sacredness of human beings even in the midst of their annoying or even catastrophic cruelties to each other. That means the person who disagrees with you on Facebook, the adolescent obsessed with how many likes their picture got, the politician who threatens all you hold dear, the spouse who irritates, the neighbor who annoys, the person who disappoints you and the expectations you have of them.
The view we have of them, our thoughts towards them and our course of action stem from this reality instead of from a transient response to something they have done- positive or negative.
This doesn’t make life easy. But it makes it peaceful. Our world is not perfect. It won’t be perfect. But it must be redeemed. Redemption can be in fact, a more beautiful perfection than something that looks the way we wanted it to from the very beginning. That’s the mystery of the cross. That’s the source of mercy. And redemption happens one person at a time.
