原文|Bishop Barron
翻译|Carrie
 

Friends, today we celebrate the feast of St. Irenaeus, a Father of the Church. He expressed the heart of Christian spirituality when he said, “Gloria Dei homo vivens”—the glory of God is a human being fully alive.

 

So many of the gods worshipped by ancient peoples were imagined as rivals to humanity, competitors standing over and against us and resentful of our excellence. For instance, in the Greek myth of Prometheus, the human hero steals precious fire from the gods and spreads it on the earth to the benefit of all, but when the gods learn of this theft, they are outraged. They track down Prometheus, tie him to a rock, and send an eagle every day to tear out his liver. In the desperate zero-sum game of human/divine competition, Prometheus had to pay a price for his presumption.

 

But there is none of this in Christianity. God is not our rival; rather he is the one who rejoices in our being fully alive. God pours out the whole of creation in an effervescent act of generosity, and then, even more surprisingly, he draws his human creatures, through Christ, into the intimacy of friendship with him.

 

Friends, today’s Gospel calls us to expect that God will answer our prayers. Faith is power, for it is a link to the reality of God, the power that made and sustains the cosmos. When we remain in the narrow confines of our perceptions, our thoughts, our hopes, we live in a very cramped way.

 

To have faith is, to use the current jargon, to live outside of the box, risking, venturing, believing the impossible. Sometimes, the power of faith is manifested in spectacular and immediately obvious ways. There is a long tradition, stretching back to Jesus himself and including many of the saints, of faith healing. When someone consciously and confidently opens himself to God, acting as a kind of conduit, the divine energy can flow.

 

There is also the power of prayer. When some people ask in a spirit of trust, really believing that what they are asking for will happen, it happens.

 

Friends, in today’s Gospel Jesus commands us to stop judging others. He asks, “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?” We are exceptionally good at seeing the fault in others, but we are exceptionally adept at ignoring it in ourselves.

 

There was a very popular book that came out when I was a teenager. It was called, “I’m Okay and You’re Okay.” It represented the culture of exculpation and feel-good-about-yourself. Not many years ago, Christina Aguilera crooned, “I am beautiful in every single way and your words can’t get me down.” Look at so many of the debates today: the attitude that is winning is one of self-invention and self-assertion. Who are you to tell me how to behave?

 

In all of this, we are fundamentally looking away from our guilt, our fault, our darkness. We are effectively drugging ourselves, dulling the pain of real self-consciousness. In the process, we turn ourselves into God, pretending to be absolute, flawless, and impervious to criticism. So “remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye..”