Autism Consecrated

Author: Autism Consecrated

  • ACAT 21: A Study of Adam and Eve

    ACAT 21: A Study of Adam and Eve

    Adam and Eve.

    There cannot be many who have not heard some version of the Creation Story.  Adam and Eve are humanity’s notorious duo, the first of our kind and the first to bungle things up.  So numerous are the commentaries on these two that it borders on cliche to find their names in the Catholic Catechism.  Yet, there they are, occupying the entire Lesson Five of the Baltimore Catechism, and likewise, our discussion for this week.

    The Church believes Adam and Eve truly existed.  They were created as man and woman were intended to exist, innocent of any corruption, fully expressing the rich gifts of their endowments of body, mind and soul by God, who loved the idea of them into flesh and bone and breath.  Whether or not there was a botanical tree with literal fruit, or a spiritual construct embodied by metaphorical assignment, it is certain that God warned Adam and Eve of “partaking of the knowledge of good and evil.”  God wished to preserve the innocence of the first man and woman by keeping their intellect focused on that which is good, beautiful and true.  Could God have created anything that was evil, ugly or false?  No… but He did create angels with free will, some of whom rebelled and set out to destroy and undermine God’s work.  God likewise gave free will to Adam and Eve.  While allowing them this freedom, he still intended them to live in purity and perfect balance.  There would be no useful reason to follow any of the doings of the renegade angels.

    As we know from the story, Eve was tempted by Satan to partake of that knowledge of good and evil, despite God’s warning.  Satan asserted that God’s motive was to keep the man and woman from becoming a threat to God’s omnipotence.  “You will not die if you eat the fruit,” Satan said.  “Rather, you will become like God.”  It was a clever exploitation of human nature: arouse curiosity, plant doubt and watch the rumor spread.  Once Eve ate the fruit, Adam became curious and, using the disobedience of the other person as his rationale, followed suit.  Part impulse, part calculated risk, part willingness to listen to a voice sowing seeds of distrust… our ancestors’ eyes were opened.  Innocence was spoiled.  Now, instead of seeing the good and the beautiful and the true, they saw it in terms of every way it could be perverted, distorted, exploited and ruined.

    Horrified, Adam and Eve no longer felt safe.  If goodness and beauty and truth could be corrupted, what guarantee did anyone have of anything?  What once was seen in abundance suddenly became scarce.  The present was no longer enough.  Security became risk.  In the presence of evil, God no longer seemed sufficient.  In short: FEAR was introduced into humanity.

    Our previous posts have emphasized a consistent theme: 1 John 4:18.  Perfect love casts out all fear.  And, in Adam and Eve, we see the inverse at work: fear deprives us of perfect love.

    In the story, Adam and Eve cower in fear as they comprehend what they have done, and they can’t un-see the evil they now know.  They understand why God instructed them to leave that fruit alone.  What will God think?  How could he love them now?  Fear and doubt paralyze their once clear intellect.  To make things worse, Adam and Eve now realize their very bodies can be used in perverse and corrupt ways, compared to the innocence and majesty of purpose they knew before seeing the ugliness of gluttony, lust and gratification.  They covered themselves in shame.

    Of course God knew what happened.  With great sorrow, God watched His beloved man and woman fall away.  Their responses betrayed them.  Even God’s all-encompassing love fell into doubt in their minds.  Fear gripped Adam and Eve… and they could not bear the perfect love of God.  Perfect love casts out all fear… and so, Adam and Eve, enslaved by fear, were cast out on their own.

    God did not abandon Adam and Eve.  He continued loving them and all of their descendants no less than perfectly.  With the institution of fear, however, humanity remains separated from God by the degree to which that fear holds sway over our minds.

    Is there any hope for redeeming humanity’s relationship with God?  Yes.  In fact, God began laying the foundation for that redemption almost immediately.  Through promises and covenants with the ones who trusted Him in spite of this primal fall, God led the way for the eventual birth of Jesus, the act through which God would become human himself and go before us in a story that would reverse every misstep of Adam and Eve, eventually taking on every conceivable fear and facing it himself in an incomprehensible demonstration of solidarity and desire to restore faith in Divine Love.

    Remember, our task here is to annotate the Baltimore Catechism in ways that speak to the contemporary autistic mind.  The Baltimore Catechism does a thorough job of explaining the “what” of the fall of humanity from grace.  We aim, with the help of St. Thorlak’s theology of merciful love, to explain “why” – because, without a sense of why, the Catechism reads increasingly like a book of arbitrary rules… which speaks little to autistics and non-autistics alike.

    Reference: Lesson Five, Questions 39-49.

     

  • ACAT 20: Angels 101

    ACAT 20: Angels 101

    Lesson Four of the Baltimore Catechism turns now toward God’s creatures.  The first two questions review:

    1. Q: Who created Heaven, Earth and all things?

    A: God.

    1. Q: How did God create Heaven and Earth?

    A: God created Heaven and earth from nothing, by His word; that is, a single act of His will.

    Now it gets a little more interesting.

    1. Q: Which are the chief creatures of God?

    A: The chief creatures of God are angels and humankind.

    1. Q: What are angels?

    A: Angels are pure spirits without a body, created to adore and enjoy God in Heaven.

    1. Q: Were angels created for any other purpose?

    A: The angels were also created to assist before the Throne of God and to minister unto Him; they have often been sent as messengers from God to humanity; and are also appointed our guardians.

    1. Q: Were the angels, as God created them, good and happy?

    A: The angels, as God created them, were good and happy.

    1. Q: Did all the angels remain good and happy?

    A: All the angels did not remain good and happy; many of them sinned and were cast into Hell; and these are called devils or bad angels.

    Angels are certainly well-depicted in pop culture.  As most imagery goes, angels are large, winged, human-like creatures said to come down from the heavens.  They can be visible or invisible, and are most often (but not always) benevolent.  Pop culture’s angels are the celestial counterpart to fairies, who are smaller, winged, human-like creatures said to rise from the earth and can likewise be seen, unseen, kindly or malicious.

    The Baltimore Catechism speaks of none of these attributes, instead stating that God created the angels for His delight in Heaven.  Implied in questions 32-38 are several points of note:

    • Heaven and Hell are separately delineated, and exist
    • Angels are of high importance
    • Angels exert influence on humanity

    Let us look now systematically at the attributes which the Catechism names regarding angels.

    • Angels are pure spirits, without bodies, created to exist in the Heavenly realm. This negates most of the popular imagery people have come to expect when discussing angels.  People cannot be angels, nor do loved ones become angels when they die.
    • Angels exist to adore and enjoy God. At first, it may sound arrogant to think that God created angels “to adore him.”  That word, adore, means to deeply and profoundly love and respect another.  In the absence of context, it seems like quite the power trip for an all-perfect Creator to design beings specifically for adoring him.  However, we do have context.  We suggest in recent posts that God is the essence of love itself, and his acts of creation are his uncontainable love taking on living expression.  Angels are no exception.  If God creates for the sake of loving the created, then how do we expect his creatures to respond?  Also: Nowhere does it say that God demands angels’ love.  In fact, just a few lines later we will find some angels rejecting God, which negates the idea that God controls angels like puppets.
    • Angels assist and minister to God. In the context of love, this also flows logically.  “Minister” here means “attend to the needs of someone.”  When existence begins with love and is sustained by love, we can guess that those who assist and minister do so freely, happily and willingly.  No coercion here.  The bigger question is, what could God – all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing – possibly need?  Again, the context of love provides an answer.  Love, by itself, can exist; but love cannot stagnate.  Love needs a beloved, and needs to give to that beloved.  Could the angels’ role in ministering to God be… to allow themselves to be loved by embracing God’s love?  With what we’ve discussed about God so far, that seems to be the only answer that makes sense without needing immediate exception and qualification.
    • Angels communicate with and defend humanity. Here is where most of us imagine angels as winged messengers and celestial warriors.  There are numerous instances in Sacred Scripture where “an angel of God” appears, yet there are no concrete descriptions given, nor is it explained if the words imparted are spoken and heard aloud or more intuitive and interior.  The angels’ role in defending humanity is the source of the Catholic tradition that each person has a dedicated guardian angel.  While this is not meticulously outlined in Sacred Scripture, the one passage which implies this very clearly is Matthew 18:10, where Jesus says, “See that you not look down upon any child; their angels always see the face of My Father.”  It is noteworthy that Jesus gives this reference without any further need of clarification or explanation; it is merely a given.
    • Angels are created fundamentally good and happy, but have the capacity to rebel and become devils, cast into Hell. Talk about foreshadowing!  In the midst of the “angel facts” section, the Catechism tosses in both “devils” and “Hell” – two concepts that have not yet been discussed in any context.  Will this topic get more due in later lessons?    But for now, consider this as both preview and basic introduction.  Devil, here, refers to a creature with destructive and hostile intentions.  Hell is a spiritual state of torment and suffering.  There is no reason at this point to define “hell” as a mappable geographic location where flames, pitchforks and sulfur make up the landscape.  It is sufficient to think that God’s realm is infused with the benefits of loving and being loved.  Who could reject or doubt God’s perfect love?  It would have to be only the most hostile and destructive creatures, indeed; and such creatures would deny themselves any comfort of loving and being loved.  With the opposite of love being fear, “hell” is no doubt a dreadful state of being in a constant sense of terror, abandonment and untended suffering.  But, again, these topics will get more attention later on.

    This entire topic seems by itself an interesting study in God’s creatures.  However, it sets the stage for understanding what the Catholic church teaches about the roots of good and evil in the tangible world we live in.  Though the existence of angels and devils remains unseen and cannot readily be proven using the scientific method, accepting their existence does provide a logical foundation for much of what is to come.  For many, it is a stretch.  For all, it is why we call it “faith.”

  • ACAT 19: The Holy Trinity

    ACAT 19: The Holy Trinity

    Lesson Three of the Baltimore Catechism takes on the mystery of One God in Three Persons.  Scholars and theologians have worked with this conundrum since the beginning of Christianity.  While we claim no superiority or edge in offering our explanation, we hope that we can present the concept in a way that enhances our pursuit of faith.

    1. Is there but one God? Yes.
    2. Why can there be but one God?

    The Catechism says there can only be one God because God is supreme and perfect, and has no equal.  It is a matter of definition.  Since God is the exemplar of perfection, and is the source of all else that exists, He is a single point which cannot be duplicated.  If we were talking branding, which we certainly are not, God is universally recognized as unique and unable to be repeated.  His perfection (and the fact that He is the creator of all things) transcends patent, trademark and copyright.  There is no possibility of a knockoff, clone or generic formula which could even come close enough to be called “God.”  It is not a matter of supremacy; it is a matter of recognition by all of creation that God’s essence is beyond anything which could ever be manufactured.

    1. How many persons are there in God?

    A: In God there are three divine persons, really distinct and equal in all things: The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

    The Catechism adds in Questions 30 and 31 that we can never fully understand how this is; only in partial glimpses and analogy.  The full comprehension of this concept remains a mystery, which is defined as a truth we do not yet understand.

    There is so much already written about the Trinity that readers are better off exploring this on their own than trying to learn it here.  The better part, here, is to present a recurring theme in the Catholic faith, which is comfort with the unknown.

    Autistics are known for concrete, predictable and logical thinking.  Uncertainty can be an autistic’s archnemesis.  So, the first point we want to make is that there is no uncertainty in discussing the Trinity.  We are quite certain that there are three distinct and equal persons in one God.  This, to us, is not up for question.

    The HOW becomes the sticking point.  Many want a solid explanation in order to accept the conclusion.  But, just as scientific research must accept in part the unknown, so too our faith must accept that we humans have neither terminology nor paradigm to relate to something as utterly impossible as one entity consisting of three distinct, equal persons.  Every known creature has a one-to-one correspondence with its essence, whether human or plant or animal.  No species has been discovered which has multiple distinct, separate and equal essences.  Even if we looked to the extremes, we’d find that polymorphic organisms or multiple personalities do not express the full criteria of distinct, separate and equal all of the time.  Scientific research requires faith, or trust that a truth exists even if we have not yet reached it.  Our second point is that something is not negated just because its explanation has not been found.

    One person’s suggestion of the HOW of the Trinity employs geometric imagery:

    Finally, WHY?  Why have three distinct, equal persons?  Well, we don’t know… not definitively, anyway.  But, sticking with our answer from the past two posts, we believe it fits our notion that God is the essence of love, personified.  Love cannot exist by itself; neither can God.  Once again, there is much to be explored by readers on the theme of love within the Holy Trinity.  Two such articles, written by our spiritual director Fr. Mark Nolette, explore this topic in greater detail:

    First, by way of the teachings of Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia, “The Joy of Love”

    Then, this, by way of reflecting on the Gospel of John.