Anyone who gives freedom to another assumes great risks, whether it be a parent to a child or a Creator to a creature. In a certain sense, even God took a great risk when He made man free, for the very freedom to become a child of God implied the possibility of becoming a rebel.

Since God made us to choose what is right, we are also free to choose the wrong. We too often interpret freedom as the right to break God's commandments. When you buy an automobile, the manufacture will give you a set of instructions. He will tell you the pressure to which you ought to inflate your tires, the kind of oil you ought to use in the crankcase, and the proper fuel to put in the gas tank. Really, he has nothing against you because he gives you these instructions, as God had nothing against you in giving you His commandments. The manufacturer wants to be helpful: he is anxious that you get the maximum utility out of the car. And God is more anxious that you get the maximum happiness out of life. That is why He gives you commandments.

But of course you are free. You can do as you please. You ought to use gasoline in the tank, but you can put in Chanel 5. Now there is no doubt that it is nicer for your nostrils if you fill the tank with perfume rather than with gasoline. But the car simply will not run on Smell / Chanel 5. In like manner we were made to run on the fuel of God's love and commandments, and we simply will not run on anything else. We just bog down. And that is what happened to human nature in the Fall.

God did not give man the frightening responsibilities of freedom without at the same time offering him incentives to choose right rather than wrong. God would not force His happiness on anyone. In almost so many words, God said to Adam and Eve at the very beginning of history: As an inducement to choose what is best, I shall give you certain gifts. If you use your freedom in the direction of what is best for you, that is, for your perfection, I shall give you permanently the supernatural gift of sharing in my Divine Nature, that is, of being a child of God and an heir of heaven. To this I add permanently some lesser gifts: You will never die, your passions will never rebel against your reason, and your mind will be free from error.

But to preserve these gifts for themselves and posterity, one condition was imposed on Adam and Eve by God, and it was very easy. They merely had to love God who is their perfection. We must not think that this condition was equivalent to saying to a child: "If you eat a woolly worm, I will give you a dollar" because a woolly worm is not the perfection of a child. Rather, it was like saying to the child: "If you drink milk and eat good food you will be healthy." As obeying the laws of health is the perfection of the child, so too obeying the will of God is our perfection.

We said that the one condition imposed was that they love God. But how could man prove his love of God? How do you know anyone loves you? Because he tells you? Most certainly not! Love is proved only one way: by an act of choice, by choosing the one we love over something or somebody else. Love is not love unless it is free; it is only because of the possibility of saying "No" that there is so much harm in the "Yes."

Hence the choice presented to our first parents was between a fruit and a garden, the part and the whole. God said they could eat of all fruits in the garden of Paradise, save the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Was there anything unreasonable about the trail? Is not life filled with abundant instances of receiving rewards on the condition of love? Imagine a wealthy man going away for the summer and telling the chauffeur and his wife that they may live in his house, eat his food, drink his wine, use his cars, and ride his horses, but on one condition: That they must not eat the artificial apple he has on the dinning room table. The owner well knows the artificial apple will give them indigestion. He does not tell them that. They ought to trust him in the light of all he has done for them. Now if the wife persuades her husband to eat the apple, she would not be a lady; and if he eats it, he would not be a gentleman. By doing the one thing forbidden they would lose all the good things provided and have indigestion besides - and they even lose the opportunity of passing these things on to their children.

To make light of the fruit in the story of the Fall is to miss the point that it was the test of love. Not to shake hands with a passerby on the street is of no importance, but not to shake hands as a sign of contempt is very serious. eating of the forbidden fruit was a sign of contempt; the symbol of rebellion. Like Pandora, man opened the forbidden box and lost all his treasures.

But you ask: Well! Granted that Adam sinned! What have I to do with Adam? Why should I be punished because of him? When President Roosevelt declared war on December 8, 1941, you declared war without any explicit declaration on your part. What the Chief of the Nation did, we did. Now Adam is the head of the human race. What he did, we did. "Through one man, sin entered the world." - Rom. 5:12 -

But you say: "It was very unjust of God to deprive me of friendship with Him, and these other gifts, simply because Adam sinned." There would have been injustice if God deprived you of your due. But you are no more entitled to be a child of God than a razor has a right to bloom, or a rose has the right to bark, or a dog has the right to quote Dante. What Adam lost was gifts, not a right.

On Christmas Day when you distribute gifts to your friends, would I have a right to say to you: "Why do you not give me a gift?" You would answer: "I am not doing you an injustice, because I owe you nothing. I am not even obliged to give these gifts to my friends. And if I had not given them gifts, I would not have deprived them of anything I owed them." So neither did God owe us anything beyond our nature as a creature of His handiwork.

But the loss of the supernatural gift of being a child of God weakened our will and darkened our intellect without corrupting our nature. The Fall disorganized our normal human faculties, making us just as we are now, with a bias toward evil, with a will reluctant to do good, with a tendency to rationalize evil. But each of us is still human - not a depraved human, totally corrupt, as those who ridicule the doctrine of the Fall say, but still a person capable of becoming what each once was. The disorder in us is like getting dirt in our eye: we still have the eye as an organ of sight, but it sees through tears. It is right here that Christianity begins. In all other religions you have to be good to come to God. In Christianity you do not. Because there is evil in the world, we need God. Christianity begins with the recognition that there is something in your life and in the world that ought not to be, that need not be, and that could be otherwise were it not for evil choices. If you are ever to be good, you must first believe you are bad.

If you know that you could be better than you are; if you feel like the master painting of a great artist that has become somewhat defaced and stained; if you know that though you are too good for the rubbish heap, you are nevertheless too spoiled to hang in the Metropolitan Gallery; if you know that you cannot restore yourself to your pristine beauty; if you know that no one could restore you better than the Divine Artist who made you - then you have already taken the first step toward peace. The Divine Artist did come to restore the original and He came on Christmas Day.

Such is the meaning of Christmas. The Son of God became man that man might become the adopted son of God.

This is Christmas Eve. Kind of sad, isn't it?

Fathers! are not your sons away because there is something wrong with the world? Then maybe God is out of His Heaven because there is something wrong with man. That star blazing in Bethlehem's sky is the Heavenly Father's service flag. His Son too has gone to war.

Mothers! You shrink in terror and fear from what might happen to your boy amidst whistling steel and whining shell. Then understand how another Mother drew a Babe to her breast in fear of the thundering hoofs and drawn swords of those who would take away His life before He had scarcely begun to live.

Sons and daughters in the service: To conquer, you must first make a landing in enemy territory. That was Bethlehem - God's beachhead in a land of sin. And how we must fight to keep it!

You dead on the far-thrown battlefields of the war! You died that others might live. You were the human expendables. This Babe is the Divine Expendable who came not to live but to die, that we might die to sin and live to love!

But you ask: how find Christmas peace in a world at war? You cannot find peace on the outside but you can find peace on the inside, by letting God do to your soul what Mary let Him do to her body, namely, let Christ be formed in you. As she cooked the meals in her Nazarene home, as she nursed her aged cousin, as she drew water at the well, as she prepared the meals of the village carpenter, as she knitted the seamless garment, as she kneaded the dough and swept the floor, she was conscious that Christ was in her; that she was a living ciborium, a monstrance of the Divine Eucharist, a Gate of Heaven through which a Creator would peer upon creation. a Tower of Ivory up whose chaste body He was to climb "to kiss upon her lips a mystic rose."

As He was physically formed in her, so He wills to be spiritually formed in you. If you knew He was seeing through your eyes, you would see in every fellow man a child of God. If you knew that He worked through your hands, they would bless all the day through. If you knew He spoke through your lips, then your speech, like Peter's would betray that you had been with the Galilean. If you knew that He wants to use your mind, your will, your fingers, and your heart, how different you would be. If half the world did this there would be no war!

Why not resolve this year to spend an hour a day in His presence? Do not stay away because you are wicked. Remember that Babe did not come to earth because you are good, but because you are not. He did not come because there was Peace, but because there was none.

Children are so unsuspecting. Taking candy away from a baby is easy - but not as easy as taking happiness from that Child!

Let not your unworthiness keep you back. Remember, love is blind, and no love is as blind as this Child's; otherwise, how could He love you and me? He does love us and that is enough to make us very happy.

That is what I mean when from a devoted heart I say, "Merry Christmas, Friends!"


BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN  ( 1895 to 1979 )

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Sunday, May 24, 2009

I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!

I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.

HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -