PILLAR OF FAITH ^_[1]

LOVE AFFAIR WITH TREES

1.  For thousands of years, human beings have had a love-affair with trees. To this day, man depends on timber and other lumber products to frame, build and finish his dwellings. He burns wood for heat in winter; in summer, he shades his home under verdant, leafy branches. Some have argued that man’s enduring fascination for the forest is represented in the columns of his urban and sacred architecture. One Catholic shrine which strikingly simulates the forest is Rome’s Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls.  The nave, or central section of this magnificent basilica, is supported by eighty massive columns of Montorfano granite. Six much larger alabaster columns stand next to the entrance. The visitor to St. Paul's walks into a stone forest of colossal proportions. Sacred Scripture does not reveal whether the Roman centurion who sponsored the 1^st century Jewish synagogue at Capernaum paid for its construction with his own funds, directed his troops to build it, or perhaps both. In the late 4^th century, however, materials from this early synagogue were recycled for the construction of a splendid, new facility made of white limestone. Supporting the roof of this new synagogue, and forming the nave of its central prayer hall, was a U-shaped row of sixteen large, ornate columns. Indeed, the beauty of the white synagogue far surpassed all others in Galilee and most synagogues in the whole of Judea. Today, some remains of the first synagogue can be seen under the larger, partially restored white synagogue in the excavations of Kefar Nahum—the ancient fishing village situated along the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The Book of First Kings recalls the splendor of Solomon’s House of the Forest of Lebanon, thirteen years in construction. The Israelite kings palace, boasting vast quantities of stone and cedar, was built:  "...upon three rows of cedar pillars, with cedar beams upon the pillars. And it was covered with cedar above the chambers that were upon the forty-five pillars, fifteen in each row".  [1Kg 7:2-3]  Three magnificent halls complemented the palace, one emphasizing pillars, a second judgment, and the third, Solomon’s throne.  [1Kg 7:6-7]  Among the splendid appointments adorning the temple vestibules were two bronze pillars—christened Jachin and Boaz—rising over thirty feet in height and topped by bronze capitals sporting wrought pomegranates and lily-work.  [1Kg 7:15-22]  After Israel’s Babylonian exile ended in the sixth century BC, cedar was once more imported for the construction of a new, though smaller Jerusalem temple. Yet again near the end of the first century BC, Herod the Great purchased cedar for the final rebuilding of the temple. The evangelist Luke refers to the synagogue in Capernaum as visual evidence that the Roman centurion is a model of faith. The elders, beseeching Jesus to heal the centurions beloved servant, declare, "He is worthy to have you do this for him, for he loves our nation, and he built us our synagogue."  [Lk 7:4-5]  The centurions cordial relationship with the Jews in Capernaum—in contrast to the general populations hatred of any Roman sympathizer—was indeed most extraordinary. But the Roman empire was hardly the first to conquer and subjugate Israel. In the eighth century before Christ, the Assyrian empire defeated divided Israel’s Northern Kingdom in three separate incursions, deporting ten of the original twelve tribes. The Lord handed the faithless Israelites over in battle, and the Assyrians dragged the people of the Northern Kingdom away—many by hooks and fetters of bronze  [cf. 2Chr 33:11]—to exile in lands they did not know, and from which they were never to return. Simultaneously, Assyria repopulated their Palestinian homeland with peoples uprooted from the empire’s eastern frontier.

WHAT MAKES A TREE

2.  In the sixth century before Christ, the Babylonian empire conquered Israel’s Southern Kingdom—the tribes of Judah and Benjamin—and repeating the Assyrian precedent, deported the bulk of Judah’s population to Babylon in three separate military campaigns. The Babylonians destroyed the city of Jerusalem and King Solomon’s magnificent temple, plunging the remnant of the Southern Kingdom into cultural and spiritual despair. Consequently, the line of Jesse was no more than a lifeless stump; the ruins of Jerusalem mocked the royal house of David. In Babylon, God’s chosen people found themselves the pillars and beams supporting—not the House of God—but a house of idolatry. Only through the divinely inspired largesse of King Cyrus the Achaemenid--who conquered Babylon approximately seventy years after the exile of Judah and Benjamin--were the people of Israel permitted to return to Jerusalem. There, under protection from King Cyrus, and his successors Darius and Artaxerxes, they constructed a modest temple in 538 BC and adorned it with some of the vessels and finery that Nebuchadnezzar had plundered from Solomon’s majestic structure. Working among the ruins of the City of David and Solomon’s temple, the exiles rejoiced and wept, while defending themselves from their enemies. Because trees possess great height and beauty, enjoying longevity of life and permanence, man tends to endow them with attributes or ideals of his own personhood and culture. Hence, a tree stump is ugly in his sight, and the spectacle of many tree stumps, like the ruins of a city, oppresses his soul. The mountains stripped of great, solemn forests, hillsides denuded of groves and woodlands, and spacious meadows carved up and paved over, reprove man for his wanton defilement of God’s sacred creation. A panorama of tree stumps summons a still more somber, modern image: the barbaric annihilation—or forced relocation—of whole populations on an unprecedented scale in the twentieth century. One could never refer to a stump as a tree. Although sawing a tree off at the ground does not change its botanical nature, its form and function—if not destroyed—are mutilated. What makes the tree a tree is gone. Severed of its beauty and biological value—decades or centuries in the making—the tree will never recover. As well, when a member of our community experiences untimely death, we lament how he was cut down in his prime. When felled, the tree, the copse, the wood, and the forest aptly symbolize the tragic loss of human lives and the dissolution of kinship bonds, especially within the family. More and more, family relationships are severed before maturity—through divorce and abandonment—with the result that large numbers of families do not survive intact at all. Many self-centered persons go through life carrying a pruning saw to trim the faults of everyone else except themselves. Still others, suppressing any vestige of altruism in their own conscience, wield a chainsaw—cutting people down wherever they go—leaving behind the wreckage of family, friends, and associates. Then there are the bulldozers who, in pursuit of their misanthropic delusions, mow down everything in their path. This present generation slashes and burns the green wood of the human family—the dignity of the human person, our elderly, our impoverished, our immigrants, and our neighbors of different race, our physically and mentally impaired, our children, our unborn. Professing his innocence and lamenting the deaths of all the blameless who die without justice, Our Lord speaks to the women of Jerusalem as he approaches Golgotha:  "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!' Then they will begin to say to the mountains, "Fall on us'; and to the hills, 'Cover us.' For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?"  [Lk 23:28-31] 

POSSIBILITY OF HOPE

3.  No single event has had a more destabilizing and ruinous impact on 20^th century American culture and religion than the Supreme Courts 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision which abolished the abortion laws of all fifty states. Bowing to artifice and intellectual primitivism, the American medical and political establishments have recklessly sacrificed over forty million unborn children as a holocaust-offering to individual autonomy and freedom of choice. Thyestean in its feverish self-worship and merciless rapacity, the pro-choice movement goads our society to devour its greatest natural resource—its own humanity. Abortion proselytizers—invoking a grotesque hubris—absolve themselves with a pseudo-spiritual vocabulary of healing and self-actualization. They look at the defoliation of our social landscape and call it beautiful. Devout Christians view the same landscape as an anthropological catastrophe; they are appalled at the massive numbers of human beings who, because of unprecedented violence and neglect, and religious persecution, forfeited their lives in the 20^th century. The principalities that destroy human dignity, the powers that exalt the individual as god, and world rulers that disavow personal culpability, are arrayed against the Church who recognizes evil as evil, and knows its architect to be Satan, Prince of Darkness.  [cf. Eph 6:10-12]  Alone among human institutions, the Church fully understands evils feral allure and garish disguises, and condemns evils seductive voice and its idolatrous credo of brute force, however sophisticated its forms may be. In the knowledge that God will judge nations—as he will every individual—with an eternal gospel  of life [cf. Rev 14:6-7; 15;4], and that he will judge the present generation, the Church reprehends evils grotesque mission to destroy man’s reconciliation to God. Unmasked by the Gospel and the Spirit of Truth, evil is exposed as the root and branch of hatred—manifested as the abhorrence of Divine Love—a loathing of the image and likeness of God imprinted in man himself  [cf. Gen 1:26], most especially in the souls of the weaker and helpless members of his human society. All human beings—whether saints or sinners—share in the fallen world’s universal communion of suffering. Both victim and victimizer suffer: the innocent who suffers the death of his mortal body, and the guilty who suffers the death of his eternal soul. When the voice of truth is suppressed, as in the case of state- and media- supported abortion, the chorus of suffering resounds still more powerfully. Paradoxically, herein lies the possibility of hope for the one who kills: he yet may confess the pangs of sorrow sown in his darkened and harrowed soul. Not realizing that his human soul mirrors the infinitude of God’s pure spirit-being, the sinner may feel utterly overwhelmed when, for the first time, his inarticulate spirit convulses with overwhelming sorrow for his deeds. Genuine sorrow is the lament of a man who discerns the betrayal of Divine Truth implanted in his soul. He cries because he invented his own knowledge and worshipped it as truth. In desolation, he confesses that his soul has hardened into a pillar of salt.  [cf. Gen 19:26]  God, in his mercy, wills that sorrow express a twofold invocation for sinful man—as a last safeguard against his inhumanity and a definitive and a final opportunity to redeem vital relationships. Christ probes the alluvia of time to preserve all who journey in faith, all who suffer for the sake of the gospel, and all believers yet to be born. Our Lord, whose passion, death, and resurrection makes suffering redemptive, reaches out to the wounded, the hurting, the weak, the repentant, and gathers them into a communion of reconciliation—his Church. The Spirit of Truth, "whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him or knows him"  [Jn 14:17], invites the one who suffers to be reconciled to Christ and to conform to the natural law implanted in his soul. Contemplating the cross, the tree of shame upon which innocence was crucified, man beholds the exempli gratia  (Lat. gracious example)  of Our Lord’s sacrifice--"Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends"--and his instructio divina (Lat. divine instruction)--"This I command you, to love one another".  [Jn 15:13,17]  Meditating on the tomb, the throat of death from which Christ was delivered, man probes the mystery of his own resurrection from the dead--"Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."  [Jn 20:29]

MAN OF WAR, MAN OF FAITH

4.  King David, Solomon’s father, worried that the Lord dwelled in a tent while he himself lived in a palace of cedar. Speaking through the prophet Nathan, the Lord answered David: "I have not dwelt in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent for my dwelling. In all places where I have moved with all the people of Israel, did I speak a word with any of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, Why have you not built me a house of cedar?"  [2Sam 7:6-7]  While the Lord loved David exceedingly, he would not permit his temple to be constructed by a king celebrated in song and dance for having slain his ten thousands.  [cf. 1Sam 21:11]  It would fall to Solomon—a man of peace  [1Chr 22:9]—to build God’s house. Said the aging King David to Solomon:  "My son, I had it in my heart to build a house to the name of the Lord my God. But the word of the Lord came to me, saying, You have shed much blood and have waged great wars; you shall not build a house to my name, because you have shed so much blood before me upon the earth."  [1Chr 22:7-8]  Until such time, the Ark of God, constructed of gold and acacia wood, would remain in the Holy of Holies in the portable tent of meeting  [cf. Deu 31:14-15]  according to Mosaic law. There the priests continued to offer sacrifices and invoked God in the cloud of his majesty. Luke’s centurion, while a man of war, was exceedingly generous to the Jews of Capernaum. Far from superficial, his relationship with the villagers was characterized by mutual respect and affection. The Roman leader believed in the power of good, and perceived the Jewish religion as an authentic instrument of mediation between God and man. Thus, when his beloved servant falls ill, he places his trust, not in his own Hellenistic gods, but in the divine power of Jesus of Nazareth. Reluctant to approach Our Lord directly, the centurion sends a delegation of Capernaum’s Jewish elders to convince the young rabbi to heal his slave. To the elders, their patrons concern was anything but perfunctory and routine—the centurion was "worthy to have (Jesus) do this for him, for he loves our nation, and he built us our synagogue".  [Lk 7:4-5]  His worthiness, said the elders to Jesus, is manifested by his love for the Jewish nation and his gift of the very synagogue in which Jesus preached and taught. Not surprisingly did Jesus agree to accompany them to the centurions residence. Aware that Jesus was approaching his house, the Centurion sends a second delegation to him bearing a solemn, even reflective message. As a sign of respect, the Roman addresses Jesus as Lord (Gk. kyrios). Sacred Scripture does not reveal whether his use of lord is secular or spiritual. Nevertheless, the soldiers honorific acknowledges that Jesus—possessing power and authority and exercising them—is a person of superior rank. Clearly, the centurion esteems Jesus. Not as if both were peers, or privileged members in their respective societies, does he speak. The foreigners humble expression of unworthiness would later be memorialized in the communion rite of the Catholic Mass: I am not worthy to have you enter my house....but only say the word, and I shall be healed.  [cf. Lk7: 6-7]  The centurions self-deprecation notwithstanding, both he and Jesus are men of authority, and it is to the Jesus of Authority that he addresses his need for divine healing power:  "For I am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me: and I say to one, Go, and he goes; and to another, Come, and he comes; and to my slave, Do this, and he does it."   [Lk 7:8]  Thus does the Roman officer speaks of himself as architect or builder in Caesars great house—the Roman Empire—and each soldier as a pillar supporting its administration.

UNDER THE NOONDAY SUN

5.  Lebanon's magnificent cedar forests vanished centuries ago, in no small part due to the voracious appetites of ancient royal families and their architects. Many other great woodlands, and one laments the loss of the vast primordial forests of Europe, have been destroyed over time. It has been suggested that when human beings forsake the forest or destroy it:  "...they try to re-create it, even if they have to make the trees of stone....the forest does not look like a cathedral, or a temple; rather the temples and cathedrals of the world imitate the primeval forest....No matter how urban humans have become, something within them still longs for the forest".^[2] No matter how godless man becomes, something in his soul still longs for heaven. When he forsakes the Kingdom that is not of this world  [cf. Jn 18:36]  or opposes it, he tries to create it artificially—denying the existence of God, asserting his own truth, deifying himself, wielding death in the name of life, purging society’s weak and helpless members, pursuing materialism, encouraging sensuality, and transmogrifying the family. But man’s kingdom is of this world  [cf. Jn 8:23]  and neither looks like heaven nor imitates it. Moreover, man’s evil does not evaporate like fog under the noon day sun, nor can he can simply outwait evil as if standing under a tree in a thunderstorm. The kingdom of this world, indeed the principalities and powers  [Eph 6:12], will "fall into the hands of the living God"  [Heb 10:31]  who judges with righteousness and justice. Creation itself will be weighed and measured  [cf. Isa 40:12], and the nations passed through a sieve.  [cf. Isa 30:28, Amos 9:9]  St. Paul confirms the breadth of God's intent--"the form of this world is passing away"  [1Cor 7:31]--and John the Baptist its rigor--"even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire".  [Mt 3:10; Lk 3:9]  Blessed is the follower of Christ who preserves life for the sake of the Kingdom! He is like the generous centurion who built the Jewish synagogue in Capernaum—he deserves the favor of God. The worthy disciple is a conservationist in the cause of life. Working to end suffering, he prophesies salvations fulfillment in the Kingdom of God. "Be patient, therefore, brethren"! exhorts the Epistle of James, until the Lord comes in glory:  "Behold, the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it until it receives the early and the late rain."  [Jam 5:7]  Rain and snow—reminders to man of gifts from highest heaven—symbolize the living Word by which the divine Creator nourishes the human person. In an age of great evil, the Spirit of Truth is ever more present to the world—admonishing the sophisticated and shrewd  [cf. Lk 10:21]  to acknowledge the authority of Christ over all creation. Should he "sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow"  [Mk 4:27-28], man will never comprehend how God imprints his eternal image and likeness  [cf. Gen 1:26]  upon mortal human beings. Christ, through whom "all things were made"  [cf. Jn 1:3], alone has the power to lay down life and take it up again.  [cf. Jn 10:17-18]  Our Lord came to this world to preserve life, not to destroy it. Therefore, life is the fruit of the Divine Creators love for his human creature, and the cause of life is the one truth capable of liberating man from his own nocuous inhumanity. The cause of life, while perceived as a threat by the intellectual and scientific establishment, actually enriches man’s understanding of the meaning of human personhood and thereby furthers his intellectual development. The society which preserves life sustains its moral patrimony and protects its own future.

GREEN BLADE OF SPRING

6.  Of history’s royal houses, only one received the Lord’s pledge of boundless love and enduring solicitude—the House of David. In the centuries following Solomon’s idolatry, the vile deeds of Judah’s faithless princes caused the Lord to withdraw his counsel, and the people themselves scattered as chaff before the wind. David’s royal line was cut off root and branch. God’s people, left to fend for themselves, scratched for their subsistence and mourned as orphans without hope:  "And all the trees of the field shall know that I the Lord bring low the high tree, and make high the low tree, dry up the green tree, and make the dry tree flourish. I the Lord have spoken, and I will do it."  [Eze 17:24]  There were some in Israel, however, like Simeon and Anna of Jerusalem, who looked for salvation—not in a high place, but in a low place, not in coffers of gold and silver, but in the green blade of spring, not among the columns of a great temple, but at the base of an old, withered stump. The prophet and prophetess were first to see and caress the tender shoot emerging from the stump of Jesse.  [cf. Isa 11:1]  To the child Jesus, born at Bethlehem of David’s line, Anna and Simeon prophesied: You are the fathers revelation, the light of the world, and its Temple!  [cf. Lk 2:27-32; Rev 21:22-23]  Said Simeon to Joseph and Mary:  "This child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against."  [Lk 2:34]  When the hour of Jesus’ passion had arrived, his enemies thought to silence his proclamation by nailing him to the cross. They were oblivious that their ignoble deeds would be in service of Our Lord’s perfect sacrifice of his Body and Blood, heedless that the Nazarene criminal being crucified was the Temple of Divinity. Nor could they understand that within this temple, the cosmic liturgy of Word and Sacrifice was unfolding before their eyes. The blood of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, was "poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins".  [Mt 26:28]  He was the man of peace who raised up the temple of his own humanity and divinity on the third day. In his plea to Christ, the centurion at Capernaum avoids familiarity and gratuitousness altogether. His studied reference to military authority—an analogue to Jesus’ authority as the Son of the Living God—is for no other purpose than to express his obedience to the cure that he trusts Jesus will effect. Without question, Our Lord finds in the unworthy centurion a worthy example of faith. The Roman officer, witnessing that the spirit of faith is incarnated as obedience and trust, exemplifies the gospel. Turning to the crowds that accompanied him, Jesus says, "I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith."  [Lk 7:9]  Hence, the centurion is a prodigy—a model of belief in the House of Israel—prophesying salvation in the Kingdom of God:  "And when those who had been sent returned to (his) house, they found the slave well."  [Lk 7:10]  Come to the Lord, the Pillar of Faith, anchored firmly on the Rock of Peter and the Apostles! Come to the Pillar of Truth whose radiant crown illuminates the heavenly Jerusalem! Come to the Saviour for whom humanity perpetually longs, the Life that no thorn can suffocate, the Good News which no calendar or season can render obsolete, the everlasting Sign which no weapon can destroy. Sing mountains and hills! Trees of the field, clap yours hands! Rise up myrtle, olive and cypress! Cast down the thorn and the brier! Enter God’s glorious temple in joy! Follow the Saviour, the Root of Jesse, the Prince of Peace!  [cf. Isa 11:10, 55:12-13]