Latest / Omnia Christus / 10/25/26 The Good the True and the Beautiful

Transcript

10/25/26 The Good the True and the Beautiful · Omnia Christus

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: As you are all aware, we are entering into the most religious time of the year in this country.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean any liturgical season, I mean football season, of course.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I say that only slightly jokingly.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because I believe that for Americans and for many people,
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: as the culture starts to lose its connection to God and its connection to liturgy
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: and its connection to all those things that we know were made for,
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: being gathered together,
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: celebrating an event,
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: having something that we're a part of,
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: having ceremony,
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: having colors, having emblems, all those things that are of course liturgical.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And in a culture that doesn't have liturgy,
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: all of that gets transferred over to other things, to sports, to football, whatever.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll go with that analogy that that season offers us in the church.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're on a team,
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: especially in American football, you don't want all your players to be the same.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: It wouldn't be much of a team if everyone was a quarterback.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: You need a good defense and a good offense.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And of course,
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: some teams are strong in one and some teams are strong in the other and
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: then they'll fall down in one of the other areas
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: and they'll end up not getting very far because they've only got one side or
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: the other.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that analogy that we see from that is true across the board and
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: yet we don't think about that.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we get into the area of politics or we get into the area of religion,
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: like, well, that person is different than me, so they're bad.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that person here?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because they're offense and you're defense and you need everyone on the team to have
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: a good team.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: But what is so obvious for us in the area of sports quickly doesn't become
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: so obvious in other areas of our life.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe that is something that Christ is inviting us to consider with this gospel.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit of a novel take.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not going to be your most classical exegesis.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless,
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: when Christ says,
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: with all your soul, with all your mind.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's talking about three different aspects that we have.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Three different parts of our personality.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And all of us have those things.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And all of us have to dedicate all of those things to God.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: But each of us is going to be a little bit more specialized in one area or another.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Mind, heart, or soul.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what's the difference between those?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we can correlate each one of those things to those three aspects of God
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: that theologians talk about, which are the good, the true, and the beautiful.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe that each one of us has a specialization, if you will, in one of those areas.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of us has our place on the team somewhat defined by where we stand
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: in relation to those three things.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of those things,
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: mind, heart, and soul, Lead to those aspects, the good, the true, and the beautiful.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And each one of those are going to be exercised by a different sort of person.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Even a different sort of charism, you can correlate them to certain families within the church.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: The mind, easy to correlate that to the Dominicans, the Dominican charism.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very intellectual charism.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's concerned with the truth.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Concerned with speaking the truth,
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: with preaching, with getting doctrine right, with all of those things.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's very much the Dominican call.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: St. Dominic, he was at a time in the church when there was a lot of confusion.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: The Albigensians were running around.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: They were kind of making up their own gospel.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Dominic was like, somebody has to hold up the truth.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what he felt called to do.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what the Dominicans have done in the church.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a certain orientation that we might have,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: an orientation towards the truth,
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: towards the academic, towards teaching, towards the informational.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or we might have an orientation towards the good,
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: which would be most, I think, best represented by, let's say, the Franciscans.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: St. Francis,
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: oriented towards the poor,
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: towards service, towards helping others, towards giving of himself.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Someone like Mother Teresa would be very much in the same tradition,
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: picking up people off the street, helping those most in need.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's the good, an orientation towards helping others.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the beautiful.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And those are the artists in the church.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Those who create things with words or with physical medium or who make music
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: and do these things to glorify God.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we see those things in the Benedictine tradition, for instance, in the church.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Those Benedictine monks that were there in their monasteries,
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: living their quiet lives,
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: making beautiful things,
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: making these beautiful works of art, beautiful works of music.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: We don't even know who many of these things are made by.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't put their names on it.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was all for the glory of God.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that was how they were exercising that charism in the church.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I believe that each one of us has a specialization.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of us is going to have a strength in one of those areas.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to develop the otherwise.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's not to say that you want to just be one and not have a full, well-rounded personality.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: But if your gift is to be an artist, you need to do that.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And you need to do it well and glorify God through that.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: But we don't want the whole church to be artists.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want the whole world to be artists.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Have you seen artists?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: They're crazy.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just the reality, right?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: People who are highly sensitive and highly specialized in these areas,
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: well, they also can be a little bit, you know, different in other areas.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we need each other for that very reason.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I tend more towards the intellectual.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Intellectuals are also crazy.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: We get a bunch of intellectuals around and they'll all be with their heads in
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: the clouds, you know, and tripping over things.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Not very connected to this earth.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: They need those people who have that good orientation,
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: that service orientation,
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: that helping others,
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: that practical charism,
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: helping the artists and the intellectuals not to trip over things.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: But the artists and the intellectuals are helping them to have the bigger picture.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Someone who's just oriented towards service and who doesn't have a connection to the truth.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they can get involved into a sort of activism that's no longer connected to the truth.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that can end up not being good and not being very beautiful
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: and can be actually destructive.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of these tendencies,
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: the artistic,
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: the intellectual,
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: the service, if it's cut off from the others, it can go kind of crazy.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: We've all seen them go crazy.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not good to live in a world that's dominated by one without the others.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why we have to love the Lord our God with all our heart,
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: all our soul, and all our mind.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: And keep these things in balance and keep one another in balance.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And what the Lord is saying with this gospel, he says everything is love.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is love.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of these gifts that we've been given,
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: regardless of which one of those that we're connected to.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: If it's not oriented towards God,
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: if it doesn't have that vertical orientation in love,
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: that connection to God, it can go crazy.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Cut off from God, intellectuals are crazy, artists are crazy, activists are crazy.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: All of us,
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: if we don't have that connection to God,
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: then we don't know what we're doing and why we're doing it.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: But we also need that vertical orientation.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's why, like Chesterton points out, that's what the cross represents.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: It represents our connection to God and our connection to others.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to have other people around us who are different than us and
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: who maybe don't think like us.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's a good thing because maybe that's the only way we're going forward
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: as a team if everybody on the team is playing in their position.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: But we don't have a team that's composed entirely of quarterbacks
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: because we wouldn't get very far.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's, I think,
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: one of the things that we can take from this that the Lord is inviting us into
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: to think about what gifts we've been given.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Think about how we can use those and put those at the service of others and think
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: about how we have to ground those things in love and self-giving in relationship.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Relationship with God and relationship with others.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Only if we live out our call in relationship is it going to be true and good and beautiful.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Only if we live it out in relationship will it be what God wants it to be.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Only if we live it out in relationship will we truly be able to put our gifts at
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: the service of others and of the world and set the world afire with the love of God.