World Dimension

THERE WAS an amusing advertisement on English television recently in which a young mother is preparing a meal for her baby and another for the dog. When her phone rings, she becomes so absorbed in conversation that she puts the dog’s dinner in front of the baby, and the baby’s dish on the floor for the dog. Neither baby nor dog look amused.

It is common today – in England at least – to see people walking around with a mobile phone glued to their ears. Or to see a group of people sitting around a meal table, each one engrossed in texting or processing e-mails on their smartphone. It is as if such people were not actually present in the world about them, but are living in some other dimension, communicating with others whom we observers cannot see or hear.

In a certain sense, of course, we do all live in two worlds or dimensions: that of time and that of eternity. One of the difficulties of Christian discipleship is how to be equally present in both, without letting go of either. We should never be so absorbed in earthly concerns as to forget our eternal destiny; but (as the saying goes) “we should not be so heavenly-minded as to be of no earthly use.”

 

The Cathar heresy

 

One of the great Christian truths grasped by St. Francis and St. Anthony (and which set them apart from the Cathar heretics of their day) is that “God saw everything he had made, and behold, it was very good.” The material world, the world of space and time, has been made by God, and it is here that we are called to serve Him. Yet to understand the world, we must see it always as God-made and God-dependent.

The name ‘Cathar’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘pure’. The Cathars (who were spiritual descendants of the Manicheans who at one time had attracted the great St. Augustine) thought of themselves as ‘purer’ than others, because more spiritual. They made a simple equation, spirit is good, matter is evil. The human task is to detach ourselves from all that is material and seek a totally disembodied existence. The ‘perfect’ among the Cathars were extremely austere in diet, eating only vegetables, and rejecting marriage and any sexual activity. The world, they thought, was made not by the true God, but by a lesser being – in effect, by the devil. Our only hope is to escape from it.

 

The real world

 

This, as anyone can see, is very far from the vision of Francis, based on Holy Scripture (incidentally, the Cathars thought that most of the Bible was the work of the devil, too). The material world is good, our bodily existence is good. When God’s design reaches its fulfilment, we believe in the resurrection of the body.

There are still people around who seem to accept a more or less Cathar position: but there are other ways in which a gap can open up between the real God-given world we live in and some imaginary realm to which we try to escape from life, or between what I will call the ‘whole world’ and some part of it which has become so important to us that we hardly see the whole picture.

There are people who look at the world through some narrow ideology, so engrossed with an abstract ‘cause’ that the interests and needs of real people can be sacrificed to it. I am not thinking just of political causes – Communism, for instance – but even religious ideals which are in themselves good. Or it may be on a smaller scale – liturgists who are so concerned with ‘correct’ ways to worship (whether modern or traditional) that they fail to ask whether ordinary believers are being drawn closer to God or not. You know the joke, “What is the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist? You can negotiate with a terrorist.” It is the inability to negotiate, to compromise, to take into account other people, that shows that we do not fully accept the real world we live in.

 

Virtual friends

 

St. Anthony, in his preaching, was down-to-earth and hard-hitting. The Gospel is meant to shape our lives, the way we relate to other human beings. The Saint criticised avaricious money-lenders (bankers?) for exploiting the poor. He criticised powerful lords (political leaders?) for oppressing their subjects. He criticised religious leaders for being too concerned about their own dignity and prestige to care about the requirements of the Gospel. The modern world can point to examples of all these things.

Meanwhile, ordinary people, then and now, can remain unconcerned, as long as they are not themselves suffering. Today, in particular, through the wonders of technology, we can insulate ourselves from the all-too-real problems in front of us, and take refuge in a virtual world in which our ‘friends’ may be people we have never met and will never meet. We can get upset by the sorrows of fictional characters in soap-operas, while ignoring those of our next-door neighbours. We can spend hours on computer games, and no time at all with our families.

 

God-With-Us

 

Yet how much time do we spend with the one Friend who is always beside us, our Lord? How seriously do we take His command to love our neighbours as ourselves – that is, to be as concerned for the welfare of others as for our own? How wholeheartedly do we regard God as our Father, and everyone else as a brother or sister? Does the eternal dimension so intersect with the world of time that we live consciously in both, without neglecting either?

St. Anthony and all the saints show us how this can be done. They lived consciously in the presence of God. We can be like them, if we only train ourselves to remember that our Lord is Emmanuel: God-With-Us. Long ago, Moses told the Israelites that God’s Word is not far off, above the heavens or beyond the seas. “The Word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart.” This is still true of the Word Incarnate.