In some recent homilies, especially Christmas and Epiphany, I used some space illustrations to lead to some theological points. My starting illustrations were the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope on Christmas Day, which by the way all has gone very well with that mission so far, and the fact that scientists say the universe has no center. I won’t go into any detail about those things here other than to say when you learn about them, it fills you with a sense of awe at the mysteries of our enormous universe.
But those things let me to another awesome mystery even more important to each of us. Our souls! What is our soul’s purpose? The Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph #363 says, “But ‘soul’ also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God’s image: ‘soul’ signifies the spiritual principle in man.” And paragraph #1703 says, "Endowed with ‘a spiritual and immortal’ soul, the human person is ‘the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake.’ From his conception, he is destined for eternal beatitude.”
The Vatican II document, Gaudium Et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, paragraph 14, says:
“Now, man is not wrong when he regards himself as superior to bodily concerns, and as more than a speck of nature or a nameless constituent of the city of man. For by his interior qualities he outstrips the whole sum of mere things. He plunges into the depths of reality whenever he enters into his own heart; God, Who probes the heart, awaits him there; there he discerns his proper destiny beneath the eyes of God. Thus, when he recognizes in himself a spiritual and immortal soul, he is not being mocked by a fantasy born only of physical or social influences, but is rather laying hold of the proper truth of the matter.”
My point is that we need to explore our souls which are bigger and more mysterious than the entire universe, and at the center of our souls God awaits us. We need to go deep inside ourselves through prayer and reflection and learning. I hope to do more of that in 2022, and possibly share some thoughts on this in future bulletin articles from time to time. Today, I just wish to launch the mission, and repeat a few more quotes to encourage us all to launch our own soul exploration missions.
St. Augustine wrote around AD 400 in his classic work “The Confessions”:
“Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you, and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong – I, misshapen. You were with me, but I was not with you. They held me back far from you, those things which would have no being, were they not in you.”
St. Teresa of Avila wrote in AD 1577 in her classic work “Interior Castle”:
“I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms just as in Heaven there are many mansions. Now if we think carefully over this, sisters, the soul of the righteous man is nothing but a paradise, in which, as God tells us, He takes His delight. … I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul and its great capacity… the very fact that His Majesty says it is made in His image means that we can hardly form any conception of the soul's great dignity and beauty. It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame, that, through our own fault, we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are. Would it not be a sign of great ignorance, my daughters, if a person were asked who he was, and could not say, and had no idea who his father or his mother was, or from what country he came? Though that is great stupidity, our own is incomparably greater if we make no attempt to discover what we are, and only know that we are living in these bodies, and have a vague idea, because we have heard it and because our Faith tells us so, that we possess souls.”
Catholic author Walker Percy published in 1983 “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book”:
“Why is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos—novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes—you are beyond the strangest?
Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6000 light years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life.”
Let’s discover our soul purpose!
Peace,
Fr. Greg