My parents are irrepressible
travellers. They have visited all seven
continents –yes, including Antarctica – within the past decade. They are the only people I know who have visited
Fr. McCabe in his new assignment in Hong Kong.
I can almost guarantee they have driven to more states in the past
eighteen months than you have.
I have not been to most of the
places they have. But I have enjoyed
their travelogues, and learned more than a few things about the world and how
to get there.
The world we live in is more
connected than ever before, and more reachable than I could have imagined even
fifteen years ago. My first trip abroad,
to Europe, was at the end of my junior year of college, whereas my parents
first made it about the time they turned forty.
My niece and one nephew had both gone before their junior year in high
school – and the younger nephew may yet beat that mark.
When we need help with our computer
or our credit card, it is likely that we will speak to someone in India. People in Slovakia, Brazil, and China read my
blog post most weeks. Everybody
everywhere has seen “Star Wars” and drinks Coke. I can have dinner at an Afghan, Ethiopian, or
even Uighur restaurant within a short drive of Four Corners.
There are so many ways in which it
is clear that all people, “all God’s children,” are the same. How much we have in common, in our families,
in our basic needs, hopes, and desires, and in our generosities. The
universality of human nature despite geographic and cultural differences is a
marvel. But there is one criterion by
which I encourage you to discern a fundamental split among cultures, among
lands, and even among people.
Today we celebrate the Most Holy
Trinity, Who has revealed Himself to us as the abiding mystery of divine
reality. Priests around the world labor
to present this foundational doctrine of our faith. Minds boggle; people yawn.
So rather take an approach that
requires theological citation or patristic explanation, why not just take a
trip? Visit a land or a culture that is untouched
by, has thoroughly resisted, or has forcefully driven out, the self-revelation
of the Triune God. How do the families
conduct themselves? How are the women
and children treated? How are the weak
and poor regarded? How are the strangers
received? Whom do the laws bind? How are promises kept, and disputes settled? What counts for learning, or for wisdom, or
for virtue?
Compare Christian cultures and
lands to those that are never been Christian.
See how the lands are faring in which Christ was once preached and
lived, but He has since been supplanted by a modern ideology. In which of these would you choose to live,
not as a visitor, but as the locals do?
There is much to learn from a visit
to a foreign culture, but in this manner it is possible to learn something
about our own culture that we might otherwise miss, or take for granted. All the good gifts we enjoy, of society and
freedom and opportunity, are rooted not in human accomplishment, but in
something done for us by God: the self-revelation of the interpersonal reality Who
is the source of human nature. Suddenly the Holy Trinity is not an
unreachable and irrelevant abstraction after all.
Human willingness to travel in
order to visit, see, learn, understand, and enjoy is itself evidence of our reflection
of the Triune God, as man created in God’s image. The Son Himself took flesh and dwelt among us. What a journey! He came not as tourist, but as
bridge-builder, to make possible our eventual journey to the Father.
Meanwhile, my mom and dad are
currently on a trip. Again.
Monsignor Smith
