Should I Aim Even Higher?
Someone said: “Maybe we’re talking too much about the Eucharist. We should say, ‘It’s the Body and Blood of Christ. Go to Mass. That’s it’.” True. But I had thirty minutes to fill.
So instead, I said that we should have an incarnational, sacramental, and eucharistic worldview. As God has created the world and reveals Himself to us through His Creation, we can know Him through the visible things of Creation.
Just as in the visible elements of the Eucharist, we are meant to grasp the real presence of Christ, so also, in the visible elements of Creation, we are meant to grasp the real presence of God’s creative Word and Wisdom.
By extension, the wisdom of God becomes incarnate and present in the Scriptures. Thus, we must learn to read both the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture, for they are not mutually exclusive because both have the one God as their Author.
In one of his earlier sermons, John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote:
“The object of setting up universities is to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God, and have been put asunder by man. … It will not satisfy me, to have two independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at once side by side, by a sort of division of labor, and only accidentally brought together. It will not satisfy me, if religion is here and science there. … The intellect and religion should meet in the same place and exemplified in the same persons."
What is especially poignant in this passage is the marriage imagery: the notion that in setting up universities, our goal should be “to reunite things which were, in the beginning, joined together by God and have been put asunder by man.”
Afterward, a friend reminded me of something important: “I don’t like it when we try to sell Catholic education solely on the idea that at Catholic universities, we have faith and teach the virtues. That is fine, but we should be telling students and parents that they should come to a Catholic institution because there, they can get a real education. They can study actual math and physics and biology, not woke math, physics, and biology. They can get real history, not The New York Times version of history. They can study the classics. They can learn to think and reason and evaluate important arguments rather than merely being served up clever post-liberal propaganda.”
Catholic institutions need to “aim higher.” Yes, but they should “Aim highest.” We must continually remind ourselves that the object of our seeking is the highest reality and the source of all goodness and beauty. If that doesn’t fill you with zeal for study, thanksgiving, and love, nothing will.
Some excerpts from Randall Smith. Pic: UCLA University of California.
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