Milk and Honey
21 February 2010
Ten years after her death, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta hit the news. When her private papers were published, it was revealed that in effect, she had heard the voice of Jesus telling her to establish the Missionary Sisters of Charity.
However, after this initial period of intense intimacy with Our Lord, she experience years of aridity in her spiritual life. Her papers show her intense pain, as she longed for her Lord in the midst of this darkness. In time, she came to understand the darkness and the longing as part of her particular vocation. Nevertheless, she offers us an outstanding witness to longing for the Lord and yearning to be happy with Him.
The Israelites longed for the Promised Land of ‘milk and honey.’ Milk and honey symbolised the blessings that they were promised. When they got their milk and honey, they would be happy.
Once they were in the Promised Land, milk and honey continued to sum up the Lord’s goodness towards them. To feast on the Lord’s goodness, they had to obey Him and worship Him:
‘Taste and see that the Lord is good.
…They lack nothing, those who revere him.’
They longed for the Lord’s blessing because their happiness lay in Him.
Talk of milk and honey gave a tangible expression to a deep longing: for blessedness, beatitude, happiness. In the desire of the Chosen Nation for the blessings of the Promised Land, we see a reflection of a desire that is common to all of mankind: blessedness, or happiness.
The People of Israel’s desire for the blessings of the Promised Land was inspired by God. Their longing led them into obedience. It inspired their faithfulness. It brought them to the Lord.
Similarly, all human beings have a natural desire for happiness. Our longing for happiness comes from God and draws us back to Him, our Creator. ‘“God alone satisfies,”’ as Saint Thomas teaches us. In His love, God is drawing His creatures to Himself. Only in Him can we receive blessing and joy: nothing else is good enough.
This is because we are God’s creatures. He made us and we belong to Him. We are ordered towards God. He is our final, ultimate goal and purpose. Therefore, seeking the Lord and doing His will are the key to being truly human and thus fulfilled and happy. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it:
‘God put us into the world to know, to love and to serve Him, and so to come to paradise.’
Paradise is where we shall have complete, eternal happiness. This means eternal obedience, love and worship of God, for therein lies our fulfilment and our joy. So being fully and truly human and – how right-on – ‘being the person I am meant to be,’ depends on loving God and doing His will. Only when we obey Him do we behave like true creatures and proper human beings. Loving and obeying God is vital to genuine humanity and real joy. Solely by this love and obedience to God’s will for us, can we live rightly and thus be ‘what we are meant to be.’
This contradicts the claims made by people today. They are happy to defy the Church’s moral teaching, even though the Church’s teaching is the teaching of Jesus – and thus God’s will for us. They justify their favoured sin by saying that it is just fine because: ‘It’s who I am,’ ‘I’m just made like it,’ ‘It’s what I need,’ or ‘It makes me feel good.’
This sort of muddled thinking is more pervasive than we might think. Perhaps many of us justify one sin or another that we happen to like by claiming that it cannot really be bad because it seems to meet some apparent need that we feel. The notion we can pick the sort of happiness that we want and then do whatever it takes to get it, is used to justify all sorts of sins.
Abortion is a good example. The attitude is taken that I have a right to live the sort of life that I want, so I can disregard the moral law, ignore the rights of the unborn child and get rid of any ‘unwanted’ baby that might stop me having the sort of life that I want: ‘It’s what I need to make me happy.’
We must see this insidious argument for what it is: the work of Satan. It seeks to make human beings, what we do and even the will of God, fit our private judgement. It pretends that we can decide what sort of creature we are and therefore that we can choose what will make us truly happy.
Yet we do not decide what it is to be fully human or how to be fulfilled and happy. It is not for us to say ‘what we are meant to be.’ God makes us out of dust. We are His creatures. Our fulfilment, our happiness, lies in seeking and obeying Him. He decides what we are and how we may find fulfilment. We must follow the path to human happiness that God has set down for us in the natural law, reason and God’s revelation. Happiness lies in accepting that God is our Creator, Whose will decides what it is to be human.
Now we come to a problem. I cannot help but seek to be happy. I know that my true happiness lies with God. Yet, perhaps bizarrely, I do not always seek happiness in God: I sin.
Sin is not about breaking random rules. God is not a cosmic dean, putting up ‘Do not walk on the grass’ signs next to grass that no reasonable person could possibly believe merited protection. No: sin is not the breaking of a meaningless rule that exists just for its own sake. Sin is not defined by arbitrary boundaries.
Rather, as Saint Thomas teaches, sin is our turning away from God, acting against Him and offending His honour, as we embrace lesser, passing goods. When we sin, we turn from God and fix our sights on something less grand, less exalted. Sin amounts to looking for ultimate happiness in something less than God.
When we sin, we ‘miss the mark’ in our search for happiness and are content with the result. We may even stop bothering to try to hit the divine ‘bull’s eye.’ Instead, we pick our own targets, looking for Godless happiness. We are able to do this – to sin by turning from God and seeking happiness elsewhere –because we human beings have rational, thinking souls. We are free to choose where to aim.
Scripture teaches us that this terrifying madness of thinking that we can find happiness outside of God – that is, our rejection of God, by sin – stems from our desire to decide what it is to be a human. It comes from our wish to write the rules for ourselves, to be self-determining: to be like God.
So we come back to the idea that we can decide what we are meant to be and how we are to be fulfilled and happy, truly ourselves. It is pride that leads us to declare that ‘this is the person I am meant to be,’ when we should leave such decisions to God. Those who would have us speak in this way and define ourselves, are simply repeating the Serpent’s invitation to Eve: ‘Eat this fruit and be like God.’ Pride, the original sin, leads us to look for shortcuts. We try to find better, or easier, or less humbling ways to be happy other than serving and worshipping God.
Once we have crossed that Rubicon, chaos ensues. Our appetites, our longing, have been mangled by sin. We know that the easy pleasures of sin do not really satisfy. Yet we keep on sinning. Still, we settle for lesser, passing goods rather than the greatest good: God. We are meant to enjoy Him for eternity. Instead, we are comfortable with the little pleasures which whilst good in themselves are never meant to be our ‘all in all.’
Often, these pleasures look like the easy option. Sin can look simpler, easier, more fun, than goodness. The way of goodness, the way to God, the way to true happiness, is the way of love. The way of love is the Way of the Cross: costly, tough and painful. We fight shy of the effort and so sell ourselves short, plumping for the lesser happiness.
In the Gospel, Christ shows us that we must resist the temptation to take shortcuts to easy and cheap happiness. Each of Satan’s temptations is rejected. Our Lord makes it clear that God is the sovereign good, the source of true blessedness. Anything else might bring short-term results but not lasting, solid joy. Like Jesus, we should not accept these flimsy substitutes.
This is possible. Talk of sin and failed bids for happiness must not lead us to despair. In Christ, we are made free. By God’s grace (and only by grace), we can resist temptation and look for our happiness in God.
Whilst we must remember that we cannot do it without grace, nevertheless, we are still free agents. We need to choose God over any other happiness. Yet an abstract, theoretical choice for God and even knowledge of right and wrong, is not enough. Our own experience might suggest that life does not run so smoothly. Turning the theoretical into the practical is not so simple.
To seek happiness in the right place in reality, not just in theory, we need the ‘cardinal virtues’: prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. These form in us the habit of making the right moral choices. This habit makes it easier for us to look for happiness in the right way and to choose the way of God freely in each situation that we face.
Prudence allows us to see where the true good and our genuine happiness lies. Also, it teaches us how we should pursue that happiness. Justice leads us to want to give other their due. We learn that our happiness is not in competition with theirs but is bound to it because we are social beings. Fortitude strengthens us to do what is right, giving us the moral courage not to take shortcuts and settle for easy substitutes for happiness with God. Temperance teaches us the right enjoyment of lesser goods and helps us master our instincts and appetites.
Prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance are raised to a higher level by grace. Nevertheless, our Lenten penance, good works, fasting and prayer should school us in these virtues. So we should grow in prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. Cultivating these virtues by fasting, good works and penance, makes us better able to pursue true happiness. This is because virtue helps us ‘get’ the happiness that we want.
Prayer makes us more docile to the Holy Spirit. As we become more united to God in prayer, we long for Him as we see more clearly that He is our true happiness.
When we make our Confession, as we ought to before Easter, we turn away from the false promises of easy happiness outside of God. The power of such promises over us is cut by Absolution. The sin that binds us is cut off by the grace of God, in Absolution. So our souls are opened more fully to the work of grace. Forgiven in sacramental Confession, we may approach God with confidence, pursuing our happiness in Him.
If we would be truly happy, satisfying a deep longing, then we learn to look for happiness in the right place: God. This is not easy. We must ask God for grace to seek Him. We must learn that however fine lesser goods and pleasures are, none are as great and important as God. We should not look for final blessedness and joy outside of Him.
To get this right, we should be fervent in our penance and fasting, devout in prayer and truly sorry and converted in our Confession. Then we shall grow in virtue and by God’s grace, advance towards our final end: not milk and honey but the Banquet of the Lamb. We shall see God Himself. We are made for nothing less.
The Revd Charles Miller Assistant Curate, St Edmund, Downham Market