Wherever I go in the whole world, the thing that makes me the saddest is watching people receive Communion in the hand.
Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta
I think regularly about this quote when I encounter someone talking apocalyptically. That happens frequently in our media. “It’s the worst thing ever.” It’s a catastrophe. And on and on. Most things that seem to fall into the category of “worst thing ever” for our media are Christians or conservatives stating truths everyone in Christendom agreed upon until about 15 minutes ago. People really need to get out more.
Sin is the true horror. I love Mother Angelica’s wisdom, “Try to laugh a lot, because life is funny, and everybody today is too serious. The only tragedy in the world, my friend, is sin.”
She is correct. Things go wrong on the temporal plane. It’s unavoidable. I get a flat tire. Someone gets upset with me for being slow in the checkout line. I inevitably say a wrong thing. Even larger wrongs like war, famine, and political machinations really cannot compare to the horror of sin. They should remind us of the horror of sin because they are generally caused by that malady. Fr. Chad Ripperger made the stunning statement that if every person on earth only venially sinned once per day, that would mean God was having to put up with 9 billion sins per day. If I’m an indicator, people are sinning much more than that.
In “history of the world” terms, we have it very good in America in 2024. The fact that so many people fail to understand this is unsettling. The grievance mongering in our culture does not speak well of our knowledge of history or other nations. Even our poor are wealthy beyond the imaginings of even my great-grandparents. We have supports and protections in place for ethnic, racial, and religious minorities and women that would have never occurred to anyone prior to The Church establishing the idea of equality among the children of God. And this nation’s constitution is a reflection of those Christian ideals.
So why do we find ourselves at a moment in history when people seem only able to scream at one another across ideological divides? Nuanced, thoughtful communication seems rationed to the point of famine.
It is precisely what Mother Teresa identified. We no longer fear God. So we no longer have the wisdom to love Him and one another as a result of our love for Him. If I don’t love my neighbor, why wouldn’t I just shout him down? Why would I care for the condition of his soul? Why would I even think he had a soul? Why wouldn’t I envy those with more than myself, and strive to take it from them?
I have heard many Protestants talk about the fear of God interfering with our ability to love Him. They identify the rituals in the Church as problems because they believe those to increase fear and reduce fraternal love. The casual way they refer to the Father and the Son makes them feel more familial. Yet the Church identifies fear of God as the beginning of wisdom and a gift of the Holy Spirit. This is really deep wisdom and really obvious truth.
A hundred years ago when I was still working, I was blessed to become friendly with someone much higher up on the totem pole of the organization than I. We would share lunch often, talk about our families and ideas, and visit one another’s homes with our families. Occasionally, though, when I would joke with him, he would return to supervisor mode, and I would realize I was being more casual than he was comfortable with.
This is just a silly, temporal example of why formality and boundaries can be helpful in relationships. While certain kinds of socializing were fine for that relationship; other kinds were not. And that’s how life is. Imagine that small example, though, applied to The Lord of the Universe and His Holy Son. Christ is truly my brother. He is also the savior of mankind. God is my father. He has also numbered every hair on every head, knows all my sins, and loved all of us into life. He is different from us. I cannot treat Him as merely a friend like I would those who eat at my table.
I also believe that this familiarity undermines a proper horror of sin. If Jesus is merely my brother in the temporal sense, even a spiritual and psychological sense, but one who I have no obligations toward, then why would I fear Him? If the Father is not much more than my earthy father or my boss at work, why would I fear Him?
This epidemic has entered the Church as well. Many believe that it entered through the violation of Our Blessed Lord’s body through communion in the hand. No less than Fr. John Hardon, S.J. said, “Behind Communion in the hand — I wish to repeat and make as plain as I can — is a weakening, a conscious, deliberate weakening of faith in the Real Presence.” It’s true. There is something incongruous about the care the priest takes in preparing the altar and vessels then consecrating the hosts, after which a fleet of extraordinary ministers trample into the sanctuary to grab Him with unconsecrated lay hands. Then everybody in the congregation does so as well. Then the priest will take great care in cleaning the vessels to ensure no remnants of Our Lord remain in them. What about the crumbs of Him on people’s hands and on the floor? In some studies belief in transubstantiation and the Real Presence is down to 1/3 of Catholics who attend Mass regularly. This is truly a horror. It is blasphemy.
If I don’t fear Him, why would I care whether I offended Him? I certainly do not wish to offend those I love, but I sometimes do through thoughtlessness. It’s a different experience to try not to offend someone out of love than out of fear of a temporal bad consequence. I was blessed to grow up around some truly devout, pious Protestants in the Baptist Church. Yet I somehow got the message that God would think my sins were cute. As long as I wasn’t Hitler, and professed Him as my personal savior, I was golden. At my particular judgement He’d beep my nose and welcome me into heaven.
God gave me the grace to care what’s true, though. And as I became an adult, my adolescent desire to see God as a buddy was replaced with the need to know what was true, and my desire to do His will. It was replaced with a desire to truly know His Son in all his glory.
When does one see most powerfully the glory of God? I see Him at Mass, in Adoration, and in nature. We have epic storms in the spring in the Midwest. They are, to me, a beautiful and sometimes frightening example of God’s power. He created a world where the Mississippi River can crash over any embankment we make. Lightning crackles with more power than we could ever harness. My vegetable and herb seeds explode into life in the black soil.
Yet, He knows me. I’m completely tiny and insignificant, and He knows me. Whatever my smallest, least important sin is, shouldn’t it fill me with horror and determination to stop it? If it doesn’t, isn’t it because I fail to honor and love Him enough? That’s what the truest form of fear of the Lord is to me; the fear of offending Him because of insufficient love of Him.
