Homily
for Ordinary Time 11
June
13, 2021
Seen
and Unseen
In just a few moments, we will
profess in our Creed that we believe God created things “visible and
invisible.” Much of our faith is unseen – grace, the human soul, angels and
demons, Heaven and Hell, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist – even
God Himself. Our Scriptures today speak about the unseen realities of our
faith. St. Paul tells us that “we walk by faith, and not by sight,” and Jesus
makes it clear that the Kingdom of God is not something that we can sense or
measure.
How can we believe in these
invisible realities of our Faith? Some say that we can’t believe in things that
we cannot measure. Back in the early 1900s, a scientist once famously said,
“How can we believe in God when we can turn a switch and light comes out?” In
other words, he believed that science has made God obsolete.
This is an error called “scientism”
– the belief that scientific truth is the only type of truth that
exists. But the domain of science is only the material world. Science can only
deal with things that can be measured, seen, or touched. By its very nature,
then, science cannot make any claim that the material world is the
only thing in existence – it cannot disprove the existence of invisible
realities. A hundred years ago, a Russian czar tried to disprove the existence
of the soul by trapping a man in a barrel until he died and then opening the
barrel – and when nothing came out, he declared that there is no such thing as
a soul. How silly! These invisible realities are not material, and thus cannot
be seen or touched or measured.
Then how can we believe in them? It
is true that we cannot prove the invisible aspects of our Faith, but we
do have a lot of evidence for them. Proof means that we can replicate it
in a lab, study it, measure it. Evidence means that we experience a lot of
things that point to its reality, but cannot definitively prove it. So let’s
look at the evidence.
First, Scripture testifies to these
invisible realities. Did you know that out of the 46 books of the Old
Testament, angels show up in 31 of them – and almost every book of the New
Testament, too. Jesus speaks about the realities of Heaven and Hell, and St.
Paul teaches us about grace. The entire Bible, written over the course of
twenty-one centuries by a variety of different authors in different locations,
agrees that there is an unseen world that God created and sustains.
Second, it makes logical sense. For
example, when we observe the created world, we know that nothing in the world
caused itself to exist. A tree came from a seed, which came from another tree,
which came from another seed, and so forth. So, logically, there must be a
First Creator who set the whole universe in motion – some Being that does not
need a cause but is eternally existing. We can know this from logic – we don’t
need to see God to believe that He exists. Even something like Heaven and Hell
is logical – we know that justice requires that the good be rewarded and evil
be punished, but many times we don’t see this happen on earth. Thus, we can
logically conclude that there is an afterlife where justice will give everyone
the reward or punishment of their conduct on earth.
A third piece of evidence for the
existence of the unseen world is the desires and intuitions of the human heart.
We want to live forever – but where would this desire for an afterlife
come from? Every human culture in the world has had a religion – from the
Aborigines in Australia to the tundra of Russia, from the Amazon tribes to the
cathedrals of Europe. The desire to know God is universal. Why would we have
such a desire if it cannot be fulfilled? These desires could not have arisen
just from material evolution – they must come from an invisible Creator, and
they point to an invisible soul and an invisible afterlife that we long to
experience.
A final piece of evidence is the
testimony of those who have seen the invisible realm. For example, there have
been over 150 Eucharistic miracles in history – the most recent in Poland in
2008 where a Eucharistic Host began to bleed. Many saints have seen angels –
for example, St. Gemma Galgani, a young 19th Century mystic from
Italy, saw her guardian angel frequently. One time she was in the company of
some friends, who were gossiping about someone who wasn’t present. Gemma was
about to join in the gossip when she saw her guardian angel giving her a stern
look. She immediately closed her mouth and avoided sin!
And, of course, many people have had
experiences of the next life. We have a priest in our diocese, Fr. Jeff Couture
from Norwalk, who had a near-death experience. Before he became a priest, he
was a drug addict and a womanizer and basically living a pretty sinful
lifestyle. He was out of money for drugs, so he decided to go to a clinic where
he could donate a pint of blood for fifty bucks. The nurse at this clinic,
however, made a serious mistake and pricked him the wrong way, and he bled to
death on the table. He remembers watching his soul rise up out of his body, and
then he stood before Jesus Christ. He said that once he looked into the eyes of
Jesus Christ, he knew he was condemned to Hell for all eternity, because he
couldn’t hide or make excuses in the presence of Truth Himself. Yet he was
completely at peace with it, because he knew he had chosen it freely. But then
he saw his guardian angel and our Blessed Mother, who intervened with Jesus and
asked him, “Will you give him a second chance?” Jesus smiled – and he woke up
in a hospital bed. Needless to say, this was the beginning of his conversion!
So, with all this evidence, can we
prove the existence of the unseen world? No, we cannot prove it. Evidence can
bring you 90% of the way there – the remaining 10% is where faith comes in.
Faith bridges that gap between evidence and a firm assurance. But I think we
have enough evidence to conclude that these invisible realms like the Real
Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Heaven and Hell, angels and demons, God
and the soul…they really do exist.
St. Augustine put it best when he
said, “Faith is to believe what we do not see; the reward of this faith is to
see what we believe.”
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