WHEN I STARTED this series using Father John Kavanaugh’s “Following Christ in a Consumer Society” (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, revised edition, 1991, pp. 194) as a springboard for reflections on our culture and the mystery of person, my main motive was to share insights from this brilliant Jesuit’s book which I had read many years ago. What is happening is that as I re-read the book, I am being reeducated by the striking insights.
Father Kavanaugh is right on target when he describes what he means by a covenantal relationship. I believe that this type of relationship is as close as we can come on earth to being in heaven. He writes the following:
“A covenantal relationship is a mutual commitment of self-donation between free beings capable of self-conscious reflection and self-possession. Covenant as the free gift of self, the promising of oneself, is a characteristic unique to such free beings.” (p. 65)
I have come to believe that a covenantal relationship is the way to have a fulfilling human life. We have been created to have covenantal relationships. Though it used different words, this is what “The Penny Catechism” taught. Every person is meant by his or her nature to be a gift-giver. This is how we have been made by God. To give oneself to another or others in a covenantal relationship is the way to personal fulfillment.
Created for Relationships
The consumer culture tells us the complete opposite of this profound truth. It tells us that fulfillment and happiness lie in possessing things. This is not true. No thing or set of things will ever fulfill us. We are created for interpersonal relationships, and a covenantal relationship is the highest personal relationship.
Before going into detail on how Christ presents a totally different view of life from that presented by a consumer culture, Father Kavanaugh sketches a philosophy of person that he thinks applies to all persons. In reading his insights, I was delighted to rediscover that Father Kavanaugh’s philosophy of person is basically the same philosophy of person that I teach at St. John’s University.
Father Kavanaugh points to the universal experience of human beings that they are unfinished, incomplete. He writes the following:
“This incompleteness is expressed in a striving for, a being driven to, the realization of our potentialities in a mutuality of knowing and loving. Conditioned and limited goals or goods serve not as final satisfactions for our striving so much as they constitute continual reminders of its apparent insatiability and inexhaustibility. The dynamics and structure of consciousness indicate that our very ‘being’ is a calling out for fullness, a ‘being-toward,’ a grand historical longing, a stretching out beyond the mere givenness of our limits. What is, is surely often lovely, but never enough. Thus, men and women question. And in doing so, they posit the quandary that is one with their identity as persons: Why are they not sufficient to themselves?” (p.67)
To make his description real for ourselves all we need do is took at our experience. For example, I am told about some great new movie. I see it and even agree that it is great, but it does not fulfill me completely. I am told about a new book, which some critics describe as a masterpiece. I read the book and agree that it is a masterpiece, but I am still not fulfilled. Even the presence of friends and loved ones, probably the best experience that any one of us has, does not fulfill us completely.
What disturbs me a great deal is that large numbers of people who seem to have no religious faith do not ask questions about why there is a lack in their lives, or what the goal of human living is.
What is happening that somehow so many people are no longer asking the big questions: Why am I here, what does my journey through life mean and does it have any significance?
That they have no answer is sad, but what is even more disturbing is their apparent lack of interest in the questions.
Father Robert Lauder, philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, is the author of “Pope Francis’ Spirituality and Our Story” (Resurrection Press).