Voices February 22, 2024
Breaking the First Commandment by dabbling in New Age
By Father Vincent Hawkswell
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. Most people accept the last seven, which dictate how we treat our neighbours. Many, however, ignore the first three, which dictate how we treat God.
The First Commandment orders us to reject idolatry and worship God alone: to have “no other gods” before him.
Idolatry is not just “false pagan worship,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It includes denying God’s “unique lordship” by “divinizing” anything else: attributing powers that are God’s alone to another thing or person.
The First Commandment, therefore, forbids superstition (attributing magical importance to rituals or things, even sacraments, crosses, rosaries, scapulars, candles, etc.); magic or sorcery (attempting to harness occult powers to gain supernatural power, good or evil, over others); divination (having dealings with Satan, demons, or 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 Old Testament, God explicitly forbade such “abominations.” Because of these abominations, he drove the original inhabitants out of the Promised Land. God commanded that Israelites who practised them be killed.
In the New Testament, says the Catechism, we have God’s “one, perfect, and unsurpassable Word” – Christ – 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 “now desiring some [new] vision or revelation” is 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 Catholicism is weak “mistakenly hold” that it “does not inspire a profound spirituality, and so they seek elsewhere,” notes 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 former New Age teacher. “It’s as simple as that.”
The Church is the Bride of Christ. A Catholic who seeks “spirituality” anywhere else is like the unfaithful wife in the Book of Hosea, who does not leave her husband, but wants to see what other men can offer.
For example, take Buddhist meditation, which underlies “Centring Prayer” and the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) Christian Meditation. It begins with the repetition of a “prayer word,” and the letting go “of all thoughts (even good thoughts), images, and other words.”
In genuine Christian meditation, we raise “our minds and hearts to God”; we “shun impersonal techniques and concentration on self,” which – said the Vatican’s 1989 document on meditation – can imprison us “in a spiritual privacy that is not open to the transcendental God.”
Even people who use Buddhist meditation simply to relax can begin to substitute its techniques, called “life-strategies,” for Christian prayer, and its underlying philosophy for the truths of Christianity, warns Paul Williams. Williams became a Catholic in 2000 after 20 years teaching Tibetan Buddhism. They “are flirting with heresy,” he says; often, “preferring their own opinion,” they “leave the Christian faith.”
Why should Catholics “even consider Buddhist meditation?” he asks. The Church has “a long tradition of advice for Christian meditation, such as Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ and St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life.” We also have the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, and more.
For another example, take “holistic” healing practices like Reiki. In 2009, the U.S. bishops 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 besides good spirits, there are “evil spirits, who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls.”
We are engaged in “dire combat with the powers of evil,” says the Catechism. Our safety lies in the Catholic Church.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. The title of the presentation next week is The Last Seven Commandments. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.
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