Tragic Misappropriation

I think we all want to think of ourselves as smart, don't we? It's not that we just want to hold a conversation or gain the admiration of other people. While all of that is nice, and even useful or pleasant, humanity seeks knowledge in an effort to grasp that which is bigger than ourselves. We seek to wrap our minds around complex realities that fascinate and amaze us, not simply because we want to amuse or educate ourselves, but because central to our personhood is an orientation to the greater, more transcendent, elements of life which go beyond our simple senses and lead us to the conclusion that we cannot be made for a limited time or space.

The very fact that we can see and conceptualize something beyond what we see and feel separates us from the rest of the created world. No matter how smart your dog may be, or how many signs you teach Koko the gorilla, they will never be able have faith or hope in anything because they have no sense of it. They are merely mortal creation, bound to the limits of their sensory world.

Sad right? NO! This is order! This is natural hierarchy! This is the nature of all creation pointing to us and past us as we stand on the pinnacle of what can be held, and look beyond us to a world that can only be known by revelation and meditation. It can be pondered and expounded upon, and our knowledge of it can be transposed by those gifted by God with the depth of intellect needed to pare such transcendent realities into something that can be understood and studied.

It is with these minds pondering all manner of science and philosophy that we come to understand who we are and how we were made, both physically and spiritually, and we gain an understanding of how we are to relate to one another and how we are to relate to that singular infinite greatness that stands above us and reaches out to us. This is how we come to study philosophy, theology, sociology, history, biology, and all other manner of sciences that are meant to pull our experiential and spiritual knowledge together and bring us into greater awe and devotion to the one who made it all.

However, what happens when God is ignored? What happens when the gift of intellect is given yet misdirected. What happens when the hierarchy of nature is disregarded, or worse, what if those gifted and eloquent minds take the pointing of nature to indicate finality and climax in the human person, and a philosophical glass ceiling is placed on the investigation of who we are?

Neichze: Thinking as crazy as his mustache

In a western world where we do not want for anything material, and are slowly ridding ourselves of any true connection or relationship of self-giving love, we are leaving our minds and hearts open and able to hit the limits of sensual experience and turn back inward upon ourselves. All of a sudden, the wants and desires of our hearts and minds, the only things that remain even partially transcendent, become gods of our making that demand worship.

All of a sudden, those minds who were gifted to grasp and verbalize the transcendent mysteries are given the place of priest and prophet within the secular religion, and they are tasked to look at the disorder of life and explain it away. Whether we are talking of sexual immorality, loss of identity, or simply the habitual sin experienced and perpetrated by countless souls on a daily basis, the task of the thinker is to make it okay.

So, as a result, we have theories and philosophies that could fill thousands of volumes. However, all lead to the same end: Everything is moral, and every new depravity can be chalked up to social phenomena or societal evolution. All this because the God and Father if all, who made all thing to point beyond humanity to a place that fulfills all desire, is removed, and all that was made to point to eternity become an ends in themselves. Philosophical and social scientific thought is done for its own sake, leaving us with a culture that continually practices a form of intellectual masturbation.


And who are the casualties of such a system? Simply put, the students. Those disciples of the secular prophets who are subject day after day to the thought of other lost souls cannot help but to drown in what they are served. The result are artists and thinkers who spit out the same misguided ideas of humanity and our "purpose" under the guise of free thought and enlightenment. All the while, they dig deeper and deeper inward upon their own hearts and minds, trying to find meaning that remains behind them, beyond that glass ceiling and into eternity.

At the end of the day, we cannot look at our world without first understanding and realizing that there is a loving Creator who built all things in order to bring us closer to him. He is not doing so to achieve some sort of vain glory. On the contrary, he has laid the path before us to walk into eternity. He has come down, incarnate, to bridge the gaps and set us free from the ropes of relativism and sin that bind us to our senses. We must take a step beyond what we see and know, and allow ourselves to be caught up into a person that is ever ancient, yet ever new.

Saint Joseph, pray for us
Father, God in heaven, bless us