Commentary
Yes, rather, it should read: Robert George’s New Book: An ‘Intellectual Feast’ for Our ‘Age of Indiscriminate Feeling’. For the problem is not so much feeling itself but rather indiscriminate feeling. As the Gospel itself testifies and rendering from that, our Lord’s Most Sacred Heart, feelings themselves are a primordial gift of God, having burst forth from His very own life-generating and regenerating Spirit. We see that fact so brightly ablaze in the eternal beneficence of Jesus’ own loving Heart and consequently, we’d be fools not to take this seriously and avail ourselves most arduously of the exquisite divine favours radiating from such a Heart, and One at that, that cannot help but radiate such unfathomable depths of love because the very nature of this Heart is nothing other than pure love.
Hence the title of the National Catholic Register’s article makes absolutely no sense unless the word indiscriminate is included because, as Pope Francis recently pointed out in his conference with seminarians, a heart without tenderness and mercy is cold and hollow, and as such does not give Holy Mother Church her necessary vitality nor can such a heart truly be called “at one with the Body of Christ” – see my previous post. And so the theme that was explored there continues on here….on this most adorable of Feasts, that of Jesus’ Most Sacred Heart.
We are reminded that our world right now is suffering from the malaise of being without a true heart, because a malaise of cold-hearted indifference habitually blights our earth. Yes, it’s equally true that popular culture idolizes feelings, but on the whole the feelings it idolizes are feelings which are frightfully raw with unchaste profanity, and so brimming with the banality of either lust or unGodly anger. These are feelings that constitute the epitome of sin and are for that reason, precisely at odds with God’s holy desire for purity within our human expression. And that inane idolatry of lust and violence is what needs challenging insofar as feelings go; not feelings themselves. And this primarily is the reason for Robert George’s confusion, which is also why it is so urgent to remind everyone that it is not feelings themselves that we are or need to be “at war with” but rather, more precisely those feelings that are opposed to the love of God. It would be a grave mistake, and one that could, should it remain undetected and uncorrected, lead us down the slippery slope to perdition if we persist in forgetting that the Cornerstone of God’s love is the knowledge of His tenderness and mercy, and that such divinely human affection constitutes a healthy outpouring of feelings – that active display of our heart’s love as endowed within us by God – love for God and love for one another, love for life, the sacredness of life which God has fashioned in our midst. Without the reality of such feelings being present in our experience, our religious experience, extending on into and right through to that of our daily lives, we are as the dull, ding-batty pointless clanging cymbal that St Paul speaks of in 1Corinthians 13 : 1. For, as we saw from the previous post, true righteousness cannot abide devoid of or without the complementarity of tenderness and mercy. It would do us well to always remember that these are inseperable partners in the divine purpose.
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