Third Sunday of Lent, Year B
First Reading: Ex 20:1-17
Second Reading: 1 Cor 1:18, 22-25
Gospel Reading: Jn 2:13-25
This Sunday’s First Reading lists the Ten Commandments. The last seven, which most people accept, dictate our behaviour toward our neighbours; the first three, which many people ignore, dictate our behaviour toward God.
First, we must worship not idols, but God alone, having “no other gods” than him.
Idolatry is not just “false pagan worship,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It also includes rejecting or denying God’s “unique lordship” by “divinizing” something else: attributing to another thing or person powers that are God’s alone.
The First Commandment, therefore, forbids superstition (attributing magical importance to rituals or things, even sacramentals, like rosaries or candles); magic or sorcery (attempting to harness occult powers and gain supernatural power over others, for either good or evil); divination (having recourse to Satan or demons or conjuring up the dead); and any practice falsely supposed to “unveil” the future (astrology, horoscopes, Ouija boards, tarot cards, omens, lots, charms, mediums, clairvoyance, fortune-telling, palm-reading, psychic reading, etc.).
In the Book of Deuteronomy, God explicitly forbade such “abominations.” Because of them, he drove the original inhabitants out of the Promised Land. He commanded that Israelites who practised them be put to death.
Christ is God’s “one, perfect, and unsurpassable Word,” says the Catechism, and “it is through [his] Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help toward salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained.”
Therefore, anyone “desiring some [new] vision or revelation would be guilty not only of foolish behaviour, but also of offending [God], by not fixing his eyes entirely upon Christ and by living with the desire for some other novelty.”
People whose understanding of the Catholic faith is weak “mistakenly hold” that Catholicism “does not inspire a profound spirituality, and so they seek elsewhere,” says the Vatican’s 2003 document on New Age. “Idolatry remains a constant temptation.”
“When you start dabbling in the New Age, you break the First Commandment,” says Moira Noonan, a serious New Age teacher and practitioner for over 20 years before she returned to the Church. “It’s as simple as that.”
A Catholic who seeks “spirituality” outside the Catholic Church is like the unfaithful wife in the Book of Hosea, who seeks what other men can offer.
For example, take Buddhist meditation. Paul Williams, who became a Catholic in 2000 after 20 years of practising and teaching Tibetan Buddhism, warns of two dangers. First, its techniques, called “life-strategies,” can come to replace true Christian prayer. Second, its principles and presuppositions, assumed and expressed in “meditation circles,” can come to replace the truth of Christianity.
(The Vatican’s 1989 document on Christian meditation contains similar warnings.)
“Why should a Christian even consider Buddhist meditation?” Williams asks. “There is a long tradition of advice for Christian meditation, such as Thomas … Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and St. Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life – two of my favourites. There are the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, the Divine Office, daily Mass,” and the Catholic Eastern-rite ‘Jesus Prayer.’”
His experience, he says, shows that Christians who practise Buddhist meditation “are flirting with heresy” and that “all too often, preferring their own opinion to orthodoxy, they leave the Christian faith.”
For another example, take “holistic” healing practices, such as Reiki. In a 2009 statement, the US bishops’ Committee on Doctrine warned that trusting Reiki means accepting, at least implicitly, “central elements of the worldview that undergirds” it, which “belong neither to Christian faith nor to natural science.”
New Age claims to be “spiritual.” However, Catholics know that not all spirits are good: there exist “evil spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls,” as the Church has said for over a century in the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel. Congregations are once again reciting it after Mass in many parishes.
We are engaged in “dire combat with the powers of evil,” says the Catechism. Our safety lies in the Catholic Church.
We do not have to know where all the rocks are; we just have to know where the deep water is.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. All the materials (video and print) are available online free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 25, The Last Seven Commandments, will be available March 7.
More reading on Christian meditation:
More from Father Vincent Hawkswell: