Ep 90 - Beyond Bare Minimum Catholicism

On this Pentecost Sunday, we reflect on the gift of the Holy Spirit and what it truly means to live as mature Christians.

Too often, faith can become reduced to simply following rules and doing the bare minimum. But the Holy Spirit invites us beyond obligation and into the freedom of love — a freedom where we no longer ask, “What do I have to do?” but rather, “How can I grow closer to God?”

This episode explores the difference between living by external laws and living by the Spirit, who guides us not just away from evil, but toward the fullness of life and love that God desires for us. ✨

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Episode 90 of Brother from Another Father as we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost. Pentecost was an all-traditional Jewish feast that was celebrated 50 days after the Passover. It commemorated the gift of the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. By adopting this traditional Jewish feast as a Christian feast, Luke is suggesting that it is the gift of the Holy Spirit that has now replaced the gift of the law. The rabbis taught that when God gave the law to Moses, his words changed into seventy tongues of fire, to symbolize that the law was for the nations of the earth, thought at that time to number 70. In the book of Exodus, we also hear that peals of thunder and flashes of lightning accompanied the giving of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai, which is why Luke is also sure to note that peals of thunder and flashes of lightning accompanied the gift of the Holy Spirit to the apostles that we hear about in our first reading today. When we say that the Holy Spirit has replaced the law, what do we mean by that? Well, Saint Paul uses a very helpful image to convey this idea. Saint Paul, when he talks about the law, uses an interesting metaphor for the law, calling it the law the paidia, which was a Greek word that designated the babysitter who would accompany the children of a wealthy family to school. Once the child had reached the school, there was no more need for the paidia. The real teacher could begin the lessons. The paidia had served its function once it had got the children to school. In an analogous way, the same goes for the law. Once the law has brought us to the freedom of the Spirit, there is no longer any need for the law. Just like there was no need for the paidia for the babysitter, once the children were at school, the teacher could take over, the babysitter wasn't needed anymore. But this does not mean that the law passes away. Indeed, Jesus states very clearly in the Gospel of Matthew that not one iota of the law will pass away until it has achieved its purpose. And its purpose is to get everyone into the kingdom of heaven. A good image of this is to see the law like a fence erected around a giant amusement park to keep the children safe as they play in this park and experiment with the rides which are in the park. Now, as long as we are convinced that God wants the best for us, we don't even know need to know that there is a fence. We will be content to stay in the middle of the amusement park and explore the rides that we find in the amusement park. But if we start doubting that God wants the best for us, we will be tempted to go to the very limits of the park, to climb the fence, and to look at what is outside the park, because maybe there are rides that are more fun and enjoyable outside the park. God knows that this is of course not the case, which is why God has constructed the fence to help us. But there are some people who just simply insist on pushing the boundaries, who literally want to sit on the fence, who don't want to commit their to living their lives inside the park, because they don't want their freedom to be limited, so they flirt with danger and walk along the fence, testing the boundaries. Often such people are so used to living their lives on the borders of the amusement park that they can no longer tell whether they're in the park or not in the park. It all becomes grey to them. And for these people the law is essential to be able to say to them, you are now outside the park and you are going to get hurt. Because while God can guarantee our safety and security while we stay inside the amusement park, as soon as we go outside the fence, God can no longer guarantee our safety. So, with the fence, God invites us to realize that our best interests and our happiness lie inside the park. The fence is there for when we are tempted to stray outside the park, to look at what other options there might be, and for when we get confused, we need to look at the law. The law will tell us when we are inside the park and when we are outside the park. The law is there to invite us to come back into the park. If we are the kind of people who like exploring what might be outside the park, we are continually faced by a choice between good and evil. We are continually faced by choices between good things and bad things. And if we're not sure about what is good and what is bad, sometimes we need to be helped to make the choice for the good by the law, which tells us where the park is and where what God wants for us, and where danger lies, and where we are outside the fence. So if you are faced with the choice, for example, whether to steal or not to steal, the law helps such a person by giving a very clear answer. You should not steal, for that is wrong. You will end up hurting yourself and others. In a Christian spiritual tradition, there are three states that a person can be in the purgative, number one, number two, the illuminative, and number three, the unitive state. The first state, the purgative state, is the one I have just been describing, where we are trying to purify our lives from being in a state where most of our choices are between one good thing and a bad thing. In the purgative state, your best friend is the law. Hopefully, we do not need to stay in this state for too long. I'm going to skip the illuminative stage, the second stage, because I don't want this to get more complicated than we have time for. But in the third stage, once you get to the unitive stage, the majority of your choices should now not be between one bad thing and one good thing, between good and evil, but rather between two good things. This is where, to go back to our metaphor, the amusement park, you are in the middle of the amusement park, and you are trying to choose which ride to go on. All the rides are good, because they've all been provided by God. But which one is right for you? No law can give you the answer to this question, and this is now where the Holy Spirit comes in. The Holy Spirit helps us to discern between two goods, to know where God's will lies for us. To give an example, perhaps we are faced with the choice of what to do with our disposable income. Do we give away a portion to the poor, or do we invest it to save up to pay for college for our kids? These are two good things. And there is no law that can guide us here as to what the better thing to do is. We have no need of the fence here. Remember, we are choosing between two good rides in the amusement park. But this is where the Holy Spirit comes in. The Spirit is God's gift to us to help us to discern God's will in our lives when we are faced with a choice between two good things. Now you may be wondering, but this was not the way that we were brought up as Catholics. We were brought up being told many laws, you have to go to church on a Sunday, you have to go to confession at least once a year, you must not eat meat on a Friday. This is what I call bare minimum Catholicism. The danger with bare minimum Catholicism is that we can think that once we've fulfilled all the requirements, we have arrived. Now, sometimes on a bad day, a bare minimum Catholicism will be all that we can manage. And God understands that. We will be feeling lazy to get out of bed on a Sunday morning, and we will need the law to tell us to go to church on a Sunday, to keep the Sabbath holy, not because we feel like it, but because we have to. But hopefully on most days, we will want to go to church, not because we have to, but because we realize that that's where we meet God, who gives us our greatest joy and greatest peace. The Holy Spirit is there to raise us way above a bare minimum Catholicism, and the Holy Spirit will inspire us to go the extra mile, to ask ourselves how I can not just fulfill my Sunday obligation by going to church, but how I can go way beyond just simply going to church. For example, perhaps the Holy Spirit will inspire me to ask myself the question, what should I be doing in order to dispose myself to receive the graces that God wants to give me through my attendance of Sunday Mass? Perhaps I can make the effort to pray with the Sunday readings before going to Mass on a Sunday. Perhaps I can read a book that will help me understand more deeply what is truly going on in the Mass. When we are in love, fulfilling the law is no longer a duty. God respects our freedom, which is why God has given us the Holy Spirit, so that we place ourselves in the school of God's love. This is actually something to be grateful for. What it essentially means is that instead of there being some external law outside of us, God has written God's law on our hearts. God respects our freedom. This is the fullness of what it means to be human, and we won't always get it right. We will not always choose the good that God intends for us, getting waylaid, perhaps, by some lesser good. This happens, but the Spirit is there to forgive us. The freedom that we are ultimately called to is the freedom to love. You cannot legislate love. But many people are afraid of their freedom. They want strict laws to indicate to them where they should go. The Holy Spirit is there to make our freedom less scary and rather more of an adventure as we seek to let God's grace in us blossom in surprising and unexpected ways. God bless and have a good Sunday.