The Sin of One Is Not The Fault of All
Dear Editor: In response to the recent letter written by Deacon Gleason, while we all agree that what happened at St. Patrick’s Cathedral was a horrible event, it is by no way the norm of most funeral Masses. It was a group of people trying to make a statement on the most visible platform they could find.
For regular people at regular funeral Masses, it is wonderful to have members of the family participating in the liturgy. Isn’t the Church a family? And at this time of sorrow, should we not include rather than exclude.
The deacon wants the eulogy at the end of Mass done away with. They are kind of the warm hug that the family receives before they leave for the cemetery.
Someone talks about how much the deceased was respected, accomplished, admired, and loved. What a nice way to end the liturgy and go on to what I have always found the hardest part of a funeral, the final destination.
Let us give those grieving as much comfort as we can in imitation of Jesus who would comfort broken hearts.
Maria F. Mastromarino
Manalapan NJ
The Lord Desires Our Hearts for Himself
Dear Editor: Lent is a time to examine our conscience, and ask the Spirit of God to purify our soul.
Why, you may ask?
We often do not fully realize the pride and arrogance that live in our hearts. We make ourselves the center of everything. We are not.
We were made in the image and likeness of our God, the Eternal One, and Cause of our Being, and we stumble over our prideful, sinful selves. Baptism restores sanctifying grace and recovers for us our original innocence.
The sacrament seals us in God’s Love. Receiving Holy Communion helps us to remain in His love. Those who believe they don’t need such grace are lost to themselves. No soul can save itself.
The Church allows us to grow in God’s
love if we participate authentically. As my Franciscan brother says, “It’s the Post Office where we receive our love letters from God.”
Our souls are transitioning from these earthly vessels into eternity.
Each of us lives in our own “Last Days.”
Only the Eternal One judges the heart. What do you desire?
Brother Christpher J. Fishkin
Jamaica
Truth Is Exclusive to God
Dear Editor: This response is to the misunderstanding in a letter commenting on a recent George Weigel essay (“Claudine Gay and the Truth of Things,” Jan. 27).
Edward Dorney misunderstands George Weigel’s defense of a Catholic understanding of objective truth, which Dorney identifies as idiosyncratic claims of exclusivity (“In Regard to George Weigel’s Column,” Feb 6).
It should be self-evident with religious faith that no one gets to have their own version of truth. Why? Because faith includes the knowledge that truth, not some, not most, but all truth is the reflection of the perfect mind of God, and His creatures create no truth at all. We can express, discover, and be creative in giving witness to truth, but we create no truth. We can’t even really possess the truth. Truth possesses us.
We can lie to ourselves and falsify claims about what is true. We deceive ourselves every time we sin, but we cannot displace God’s reality and invent false realities. When we try, evil happens.
This doesn’t preclude imagination, but honorable imagination is grounded in ideas and natural law principles innate to our divinely endowed human condition that reflects that which is eternal and immutable. God knows everything already. And God never lied to the peoples of the past, which is why things like moral truth never change, however much we like to have our delusions tell us it can.
God never deprived any people of adequate knowledge of how they ought to order their lives together.
The problem of suffering, that we just love to blame on God, is less problematic when we contemplate the reality of sin and the permanent imperfectability of the human condition short of Our Lord’s return.
We are prone to deluding ourselves that our sins are not sins and we are not sinners.
This is why we create both personal and collectivized denial processes that often gravitate to ideological belief systems enabling us to effectively deny our sins and explain evil in the world in terms of other people, other cultures, other races, other countries, other civilizations, or other periods of history.
This is why tyrannies and wars happen.
Edward J. Baker
Fresh Meadows