https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/world/europe/pope-francis-encyclical.html

I would first like to introduce the topic according to the thematics raised in another reflection I wrote a little while back which ponders the significance of the literal meaning of Pope Francis’ new encyclical’s title Dilexit Nos – He First Loved Us . For Jesus was generous with His love and readiness to befriend the friendless. He was never stingey. He tells us through His word that the only reason why we can love at all or in return is because God first loved us. This cannot afford to be sorely reduced to an intellectual understanding of its inherent meaning either since we have the divinely given right to experientially apprehend the intrinsic meaning of God first having loved us. In other words, it is a fundamental human right to have the opportunity to experience first-hand Him loving us first in order that we can then follow suit and lavish this same love bestowed, on others. This experiential knowledge needs also to be re-ignited, renewed, kept alive over time – both directly from God Himself and indirectly through others. For if it were to die, even just for a period, we would be left despairing, wondering…. Hence the reason why I hotly objected to a ribald assertion of the pop-psychology kind which I encountered not all that long ago and which posits that “the one/s who reject you are “prophets” inadvertantly telling you that nobody except Jesus can love you……” Well folks, that’s only partially true, and it’s partial because, while yes, it’s primordially and absolutely true that Jesus is the only One Who can love you perfectly, it’s also equally true that we are made by God not to be isolated individuals but to be positively relational with each other, following after the example of God, Who first loved us – in the way that we love others, and they us – this is how we ought to both love and receive love.

Therefore, while Jesus is the only One Who is capable of loving us perfectly and at all times, others are still called by God to love us and we are also called by God to love them but the big difference here is NOT in nobody else except God being able to love us but in the perfection and extent of this love. In fact, God is the only One Who can love us perfectly and at all times. We, however, are nevertheless still called by God to be loved by others and to love others in return because this is what the Two Greatest Commandments are all about. And such is also the topic of today’s Gospel reading – Mark 12 : 28b – 34 . So I cannot disagree more with the ridiculous assertion that just because someone might be constantly faced with rejection, that this somehow automatically means that they are completely unlovable in human relational terms and therefore should forget about expecting or desiring love from others! How utterly heartless can you get! For if that were really the case, then that cancels out the Second Greatest Commandment and Jesus DID NOT cancel it out. Rather, He affirmed it as a complementarily necessary partner with the First Greatest Commandment.

The new encyclical – Dilexit Nos – is also an intrinsic indictment against worldliness. It is first and foremost that because an authentic following and application of the Two Greatest Commandments  in daily life necessitate a shunning of worldliness in how we relate to others. That means, a shunning of the dangerously popular but nevertheless false idea that you are only ever really worth your ‘net worth’. For, this notion of ‘net worth’ both ascribes to and imposes upon the human condition a malicious belief that you are only ever truly worth the sum-total of your monetary status!  Now that is completely contrary to the faith we profess as children of God. To bend towards this evil reductionism of human worth is shunning the essence of the Two Greatest Commandments  which in turn, is also a sacrilegious affront to both the Sacred Heart (Sacre Cour)  and the Divine Image (Imago Dei). Pope Francis makes this clear in his critique of popular culture’s dependance on undue reverence for both artificiality and superficiality. Hence secularism’s tendency to reducing the intrinsic and inalienable worth of life to a few ultimately senseless tropes that both commodify and fadify the nature and practice of human relationships in today’s world.

That said, the necessity many of us face in needing to earn an income in order to get rid of bills that threaten to choke our very lives is a reality. The other fact associated with this is that most people are able to afford to offset the pressures of these largely unwanted expenses, so much so that so many only add to their expense list with countless other miscellaneous and often unnecessary passtimes or purchases to the point where it becomes almost, albeit even if largely unnoticed, obsessional. Such is the way of life in the worldly existence which preoccupies the daily life of so many, and needlessly at that. But the fact is, these people earn so much in their working lives that because “money is no problem”, they are in the habit of just buying or spending it on whatever takes their fancy and often (whilst this doesn’t apply in every situation) there is just no conscientious reflectivity or moral compass guiding the choices, decisions, and actions of these many. And this kind of consumer-obsessed behaviour even blindsights many who profess faith.

Hence Pope Francis’ exhortation on the dangers of “becoming sucked in to a vaccuum” that reduces the value and meaning of life to “what you can buy” or “what sets ‘the trends’ “. Here lies the chasm, the danger of losing one’s soul to focussing on life only in the context of ‘the latest and greatest’ fads and by so doing, losing the sense of what actually constitutes real love, which btw, is the bedrock of life being lived as God meant it to be lived. Perspectivising life in the divinely orchestrated way of “real love” means setting one’s heart on deepening the quality of that love which, once actualized, embraces God’s creation with an inalienable appreciation for its sacred worth and from this, seeks to nurture every relationship with others around this appreciation.

Pope Francis is spot-on to stress the critical need for such a cultivation of this inalienable appreciation of life’s sacred worth from the midst of one’s interior life, saying effectively that faith-anchored introspection is an absolute necessity if we are going to immerse ourselves in nourishing a genuine, hope-filled relationship with Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour.

And this conscientious desire to cultivate a rich interior life filled with an abundance of graces and virtues is what defines the difference between those who pursue “getting done” the every-day life demands (imposed on them by the circumstances of just living in a very worldly world), what with all its expenses and so forth, with the very approach St Josè Maria eScriva extolled and those who don’t go down this route at all but instead follow blindly all the lures of the world while they are doing the ins and outs of daily life dancing to the beat of the humdrum of “the crowd”. The latter group lacks the necessary interior spiritual conviction and vigour that would otherwise serve as a very useful and soul-saving moral compass to help them navigate the difficult terrain of a world repleate with too many competing and oftentimes conflicting voices. The former immerses the vastness of field that is encompassed within both heart and mind in the most important things in life while simultaneously trying to wade through the various challenges, intersections, and uncertainties which often plague the everyday contours of our life on earth.

The Holy Father envisages “the heart” as a source of unity amidst what he calls “a wave of secularization and division” engulfing the world. I would like to go a little further by perspectivizing this secularist “wave” as more on par with a tsunami! Hence the heart immersed and enveloped within the Sacred Heart of our Lord is the surest and most ardently rock solid of all possible safe havens.

And it must also be recognized that St Thomas More quite fancifully elucidated how the spectre of worldliness could be erradicated just by doing the life of work very differently in the spirit that is. His classic tale Utopia,¹ in many ways captures the essence of that which Josè Maria eScriva talks about in his contemplative reflections on the nature and purpose of work in our lives.

Paul Tournier, in The Gift of Feeling ² asserts that while the humanities were considered less prestigeous than the sciences on account of the predominance of female involvement within the former’s academic streams, within the discipline of Philosophy, Enlightenment theorist Descartes popularized an overarching emphasis on “rational and scientific thought over sensibility and feeling”. (p. 14) And through this emphasis, reason became the central voice of the so-called Enlightenment. Science, technology, the idea of ‘progress’ were all fermented from Descarte’s popularization of what he saw as the ‘enlightenment of rationality’ over the ‘backwardness of superstition’. Here is also born the conflict between Faith and Scientific Inquiry. In actual fact however, these two ought not to be seen as juxtaposed but as, in a sense, complementary. Faith needs to mysteriously inform reason and be its enlightening guide, while reason can assist in the solidification and stabilizing of faith as well as act as a conduit to its dissemination. But to be authentic, the heart as illumined by the graced action of the Holy Spirit, needs to be the guiding light of faith, and reason ought to only be a means by which or tool we use to explain the ins and outs of why we believe what we do rather than occupy the position of the central pillar of our faith. In Dilexit Nos,  Pope Francis maintains that this position ought first and foremost be occupied by the Sacred Heart of Jesus for it is from this font alone that flows the source of all true undefiled wisdom. There is one observation made by Tournier on the subject of Descartes though I would have to disagree on and that concern’s Tournier’s adulation of Annie Leclerc’s assertion. Leclerc posits that contrary to Descartes’ defining the discipline of Philosophy as all about reason, Philosophy in and of itself is actually all about pleasure! Pleasure?? Huh? Are you serious? No, come on!! That’s totally ridiculous and fickle to the core if you ask me. But that said, upon reading a certain passage from another work by John Paul Thomas called Ascending the Celestial Hierarchy,³ I think I understand a bit more of what possibly drove her to say that. In his book, Thomas states that it is fundamentally intrinsic to our human nature to want to find happiness in life. He calls it “the innate desire we all have for happiness”. (p.19) He also speaks of it thus: “This unshakable desire, written into our human nature, drives us to seek satisfaction in life.” But, get this: “Because we suffer from the consequences of Original Sin, we sometimes make poor choices in an attempt to satiate this desire.” (p. 19) And I think his statement here perfectly sums up Annie Leclerc’s own stated position. She is longing for happiness but she has misguidedly mistakened worldly pleasure for authentic happiness. Actually, it is God-endowed beauty that is much more on-track with the fulfillment of genuine happiness than that of worldly pleasure.This brings me to the next point about the intrinsic need to distinguish between God-given pleasures and pleasures of the flesh. The latter is what the world, i.e. secular society rides upon as being ‘the most important thing in life’. Worldly pleasures are those things that people seek after apart from God’s will rather than in conjunction with it or as part and parcel of it. And so from what I can gather so far about Annie Leclerc’s position (insofar as it is described by Tournier), I think she does not distinguish between the concepts of God-endowed pleasure and worldly pleasure, which is inevitably a serious drawback on her argument regarding Philosophy as an academic discipline. And here too, when we look at the humungous influence Descartes had on the emergence and rationalistic flavour of the type of reason borne out of the so-called Enlightenment era, it is only right that it warrants serious critique considering, as Pope Francis too points out in the encyclical, that:

the issues raised by today’s liquid society are much discussed, but this depreciation of the deep core of our humanity – the heart – has a much longer history. We find it already present in Hellenic and pre-Christian rationalism, in post-Christian idealism and in materialism in its various guises. The heart has been ignored in anthropology, and the great philosophical tradition finds it a foreign notion, preferring other concepts such as reason, will or freedom. ⁴

And as such, an over-emphasis on reason will by and large, in due time, lead to a tragic decentering of ourselves from our hearts, and a resultant cauterization (or hardeness) of the heart will ensue. This is precisely the opposite of the values Jesus invites us to partake of with Him, and with our fellow men and all creation. We can yet again see an astute reflection of the damage such an extreme reliance on reason does when we look at the Gospel story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector ⁵. It may well be asked “who was more in touch with their heart here?” and conversely, “who was more puffed up in their heads with justifying their faults by rationalizing them away?” The answer upon any earnest reflection should be clear. The Tax Collector in this instance was way more in touch with his heart than the stone cold Pharisee! And so, Pope Francis is essentially exhorting us to ask ourselves the question: who’s example do we want to follow here?

In his other phenomenal work, The Adventure of Living,⁶ Tournier gives us a very insightful picture that essentially encapsulates much of what Pope Francis emphasizes…..Life, he says is meant to be an adventure wherein which we are led by God to discover the ultimate reason and purpose for our very existence. This is the epitome of life’s meaning. The catch is though that it cannot really be understood, made sense of, or apprehended if the ‘adventure’ merely exists outside of the “examined life”. This is because then, should it remain outside the realm of interior self-awareness, actualization, and the conscientious seeking of God, the ‘adventure’ ceases to be a “real adventure” and thereby remains a mere whim or fancy that soon passes through one’s life as nothing more than an “energetic fad” bound more by the norms, conventions, and laws of ephemerality than by those of the Divine Inspiration or Will. And as such Dilexit Nos can be seen as availing us of the antidote to this syndrome of living a meaningless life caught in the throes of fad and whim, being tossed about on the waves of an unexamined life which can doom us, if not illumined by the Holy Spirit, to drowning in a merciless ocean of a relativistic amoral ephemerality.

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Other References:

(1.) More, Thomas., Utopia, 1965, edited & translated by Paul Turner, Penguin, London.

(2.) Tournier, P., The Gift of Feeling, 1981, SCM Press Ltd, London.

(3.) Thomas, J.P., Ascending the Celestial Hierarchy: The Golden Staircase to Seraphic Glory, 2024, Kindle Edition, MyCatholicLife Publishing, http://www.mycatholic.life

(4.) Encyclical Letter Dilexit Nos by Pope Francis, 2024, full text can be found here: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/20241024-enciclica-dilexit-nos.html

(5.) Luke 18 : 9-14

(6.) Tournier, P., The Adventure of Living, 1971, SCM Press, London.

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