Accept Only the Best
Lesson 1
Accept Only the Best
Let all the acts of our lives serve
our goal of bliss in heaven with God.
Question 1
What is the meaning of life?
Thomas answers that . . .
“The ultimate and principal good of man is the enjoyment of God.”
— Summa Theologica II-II, 23, 7
Goal = Good = God
“What is the meaning of life?” Good question! I was asked this question within the last year for a secular website that has posed it to thousands of people from all over the world, with all sorts of perspectives, and from all walks of life.3 I won’t say I cheated in giving my answer, and I focused on our earthly life for that website, but I must admit that I looked over St. Thomas’s answer first! As for Thomas’s answer, one encapsulation appears above. The ultimate meaning of life, the ultimate fulfillment of why we are here, is to enjoy ultimate and eternal happiness in the Beatific Vision of God. Now let’s practice “penetration of principles of the faith” and, with Thomas’s help, penetrate further into the profound truths at the heart of this first and ultimate life lesson.
All of us, through our God-given human nature, endowed with intellects and wills, desire to know what will make us happy and what we need to do to achieve it. Happiness is that ultimate good. If we spend our lives in pursuit of pleasure, or money, or power, or fame, it is because we believe that such things are the highest goods, which will make us happy.
Thomas knew well, however, like St. Augustine before him, that our hearts will always be restless unless they rest in God. All manner of human goods — created goods with a small g, we could say — are only limited means to the limited ends or small-g goals of happiness on earth and will never satisfy us like the ultimate Good with a capital G. Our ultimate Goal, with a capital G, should be the ultimate Good with a capital G, which itself is no limited, earthly, false god, but God with a capital G.
All these capital Gs are the case (uppercase, that is), because God, as our final end, is indeed our ultimate Goal and, as the font, source, and perfection of all that is good, is the ultimate Good. Indeed, Thomas’s fourth and fifth proofs of God’s existence demonstrate God as the source and perfection of being and the final cause of all that exists (I, 2, 3). Further, Thomas explains God’s ultimate goodness in a most awe-inspiring way when he describes how every single marvelous goodness in every single created thing, from the simple beauty of a flower or a baby to the majesty of a mountain or a galaxy, is good because of its participation in the goodness of God:
He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided; and hence the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any simple creature. (I, 47, 1)
So, if you’ve ever wished upon a star, or wished you could travel to a star to see it in all its majesty (without getting turned into a cinder), or if you’ve ever wished you could have personally known some great figure in the world’s history, bear in mind that God is the source of every single goodness that we admire and that to see Him face-to-face in heaven will so far exceed the combined total of every limited goodness we can imagine that we cannot begin to fathom it. Our hearts are restless because, though the things of creation are good, they are all only partially good and can never totally satisfy. God, and only God, the total and ultimate Good, can completely satisfy our desires, leaving us nowhere else to turn, because through Him we will have it all. In Thomas’s words: “It is impossible for one man’s will to be directed at the same time to diverse things as last ends. . . . It is therefore necessary for the last end so to fill man’s appetite, that nothing is left besides it for man to desire” (I-II, 1, 6).
So, if we were to recast our question “What is the meaning of life?” as “Good God, what is our ultimate goal in life?” Thomas might answer: “Precisely! By George, I believe you’ve got it! Good God is the Ultimate Goal of our life!” As stated in this chapter’s lesson, we were made to accept only the best! Let’s do our best never to forget it, because this is the lesson of lessons, the “mother of all lessons,” we might say for dramatic flair. This is the lesson that provides the “last end” in Thomas’s language, wherefrom “we derive our entire rule of life.”
So, if we now see the meaning of life, our purpose here, a little more clearly, we have made a little progress in our first lesson plan of penetrating to the heart, the principal principle, of the lesson. At your leisure sometime in the future, you can turn to the Summa Theologica’s “Treatise on the Last End” (I-II, 1–5), beginning with “Of Man’s Last End” and ending with “Of the Attainment of Happiness,” to see how Thomas answers a full forty questions in the articles that flesh out the true meaning of life. In the meantime, it’s time for us to move on to our next lesson plan of pulverizing sin!
Turning Away from False Goals, False Goods, and False Gods
I imagine that if you are like me, it is one thing to agree that our goal should be the attainment of bliss in heaven with God (and an easy thing to agree on, at that), but quite another thing to live our lives with our eyes fixed on God rather than on ourselves. Since the Fall of Adam and Eve, we’ve all had a battle against sin on our hands. Sin takes our eyes off our heavenly goal and redirects them toward far less worthy things.
St. Thomas wrote that “inordinate self-love is the cause of every sin” (I-II, 77, 4). “Inordinate” means disordered, unrestrained, and inappropriate. It means love of the lower, bodily, animal self over one’s spiritual soul; love of simple pleasures, of money, of false gods of every sort in place of love for God. In the terms of our first life lesson, sin means accepting what is infinitely far less than the best.
All sins remove our gaze from God and place it on ourselves in one way or another. Lust, for example, has always been very good at tempting us to accept far less than the best. Through lust we fixate on people’s bodies and remain blind to the souls within them, made in the image and likeness of God. And indeed, while saints and philosophers have historically sought ways to curb lust, it is actively pursued and promoted in our time in ways hardly imagined even but a few decades ago.
Through gluttony we live to eat, rather than eating to live. Through greed we obsess about obtaining worldly things. Through anger we lash out at those who keep us from our sensuous and worldly goals. Through envy we are saddened by the thought that others may have more things or more fun than we do. Through pride we most directly and deliberately shift our goal from serving God to serving ourselves, doing everything our way.
All six of the classic seven deadly sins mentioned above divert us from our ultimate end. We’ll look at them in more depth in later chapters for the particular eternal-life lessons each sin most directly opposes. For this chapter though, as I peer over Thomas’s broad shoulders, I see him writing about yet one other deadly sin most relevant to our first lesson: “Sloth is not an aversion of the mind from any spiritual good, but from the Divine good, to which the mind is obliged to adhere” (II-II, 35, 3).
Sloth then, is the sin that provides the most direct obstacle to our first life lesson. It takes our minds off the divine good, which is God. This may seem a bit surprising to some. After all, aren’t sloths those lovable furry creatures that are never in a hurry? Further, in our day, sloth probably first calls to mind “laziness,” as can be found in many dictionary definitions. Is slouching on the couch after dinner in front of the TV, dozily munching on chips, truly the thing we must avoid most of all if we are to enjoy life in heaven? Good question!
No, come to think of it — very bad question! We’ll have a true grasp of sloth if we understand it through the word St. Thomas himself used for it — acedia, the Latinized version of the Greek word akedia, meaning “without,” and cedia (or kedia, if you prefer the Greek) coming from kedos, meaning “care” or “concern.” The deadly sin of sloth is a spiritual sloth that says, “I don’t care — about the things of God.” Laziness regarding the things of God will also follow, since we are not likely to take much action in service of things that we don’t care much about.
Thomas further defines “sloth” as “an oppressive sorrow” and as “a sluggishness of the mind which neglects to do good” (II-II, 35, 1). Sloth is a spiritual apathy, a sadness or boredom about the divine good of God. This lack of passion for serving and enjoying God is the antithesis of our first life lesson, and yet it is, in some sense, the first life lesson of the popular culture around us. We can see this in the culture, and within ourselves, when we look at the sins that accompany, serve, and flow from sloth. St. Thomas, borrowing from St. Gregory the Great, notes that each deadly sin has a bevy of “daughters,” so let’s look now at sloth’s sorry brood.
Sloth’s daughter running rampant in our culture today is that of “wandering of the mind after unlawful things” (II-II, 35, 4). Thomas agreed with Aristotle that “those who find no joy in spiritual pleasures have recourse to pleasures of the body.” In our day of extreme “separation of church and state,”4 observe how the vast majority of the most heated political debates involve precisely the “pleasures of the body.” The most contested hotbed issues of abortion, forced provision of contraceptives, homosexual “marriage,” “transgenderism,” sexual harassment and abuse scandals, sex trafficking, and legal accessibility to pornography and even to “sex workers” (i.e., prostitutes) now appear in our daily headlines, sparking incredibly divisive debates, marches, protests, lawsuits, and more.
Ironically, too, when Thomas wrote about “unlawful” things, he was referring to moral law, to natural law, based on God’s eternal law. The kinds of inappropriate bodily pleasures he wrote against were often “unlawful” in the legal sense too, since governmental bodies realized that legislated laws should reflect the laws of God in order to serve the public good. Even when kings proclaimed their “divine right” to rule, it bound them to upholding the divine laws, as the Ten Commandments, as instruments of God’s will.
Now, so many laws have been passed in the name of pleasures of the body that many of these sins are no longer “unlawful” in the legal sense but have become protected by law and are even actively promoted and enforced on those who morally object to them. Furthermore, the objectors are taxed or compelled as professionals or businessowners to take positive actions to support these once “unlawful” practices. So many minds in our culture have wandered so far toward unlawful pleasures of the body, rejecting God’s laws, that it is quite fitting to see this as a worship of false gods, and unfortunately, the chief false god appears to be Molech, who relished the sacrifice of innocent children (Lev. 18:21, 20:1-5; 2 Kings 23:10; Jer. 32:35).
Hopefully our minds have not wandered far from spiritual good in pursuit of bodily pleasures, but we still need to examine our consciences to track down and bring home our own wandering, prodigal minds. Spiritual sluggishness is not for the lazy alone. If we become overly obsessed with our work or some hobby or special interest, or even our cell phones or social media accounts, we might be extremely physically active, while mired in spiritual sloth.
Thomas names other daughters of sloth, including “sluggishness regarding the commandments, faintheartedness regarding spiritual obligations, despair,” “spite toward those who lead others to spiritual goods,” and outright “malice” (II-II, 35, 4.) It would do us well to see if they lie lurking lazily in our souls.
If sloth or any of its sinful, self-serving daughters have a home in our hearts or are expressed in our deeds, it is time to root them out and pulverize them to dust, because they are keeping us from our ultimate goal, and they might well be hindering our loved ones, too, as they look to us for guidance.
Alas, sloth has other powerful allies that quite directly strive to remove our eyes from the goal of God and bring them down to gaze upon the world. One term for this worldly view that champions sloth in our time is the ideology of “secularism.” The word derives from the Latin saecularis which means “of an age, or a generation,” and it has long referred to “worldliness” in Christian usage. Secularism is a worldview with no place for religion and, therefore, no place for God. Those with a thoroughly secularist worldview will certainly spend no time trying to conquer sin as a first step toward loving God.
The highly influential twentieth-century atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1930 that it is not sin, but rather the sense of sin, the very notion that it is possible to behave in a way that is contrary to God’s will, that leads to man’s unhappiness. Ironically though, while Russell would have us throw the very idea of sin out the window, he included in his book on happiness a chapter on the avoidance of envy.5 Envy, you see, and as every catechized Catholic knows, is one of the seven deadly sins the Church has warned against for millennia! Indeed, it seems that Russell and the Church are on the same page when it comes to the fact that envy is deadly to our happiness. (You’d think a logician would be a little more aware of this self-contradiction, but his chapter on the sense of sin came after his chapter on envy, so maybe he had forgotten about it by then.)
By 1973, the eminent psychiatrist Karl Menninger would come to write the book Whatever Became of Sin?, arguing that increasing societal problems, the growing incidence of mental disorders, and increasing unhappiness had resulted from the growth of secularism and the rejection of the concept of sin in modern culture. Four and a half decades have passed since then, and our problems continue to mount, as more and more people seem to flounder, having lost track of the meaning of life. Indeed, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2018 that from 1999 to 2016, suicide rates have risen significantly in forty-nine states, with more than half of suicide victims in more than half of the states having no known previous mental disorder, making suicide not only a mental health but also a general public health issue. So powerful is this effect that it has led to a drop in the life expectancy of Americans.6 It is profoundly sad that growing numbers of people in our time and in our nation cannot find enough meaning in life to keep on living.
Although I hope and pray that every one of my readers still has a zest for life, we might also ask ourselves how a downplaying of the dire importance of sin in acquiescence to the social winds of the times has grown within the Church herself, not to mention within our own souls. To root out key obstacles that keep us from the enjoyment of God, we must pulverize not only the sloth that would turn our hearts from God but also the secularism that seeks to divert and poison our minds and our Church as well. When we refuse to accept sloth into our hearts and secularization into our minds, we ready our souls to accept only the best, the things that lead us to God.
Building a House of Wisdom and Love
Hopefully we’ve begun to identify and pulverize the sins and false ideas that keep us from our primary goal of eternity with God. Now it’s time to hang on to our sin-slashing swords while we reach for tools with our other hand to start building up some virtue through which we can train ourselves to accept only the best. Aristotle, after all, told us that we become builders by building, to emphasize the essential role of practice in developing any arête (excellence), which we translate as virtue. I call the house of our first life lesson a house of wisdom and love because the enjoyment of God is the ultimate lesson, and wisdom and love are the ultimate gifts and virtues that lead us to Him. Further, wisdom has long had a habit of setting up households!
Wisdom, Thomas tells us, is the highest of the three “intellectual virtues,” which perfect our mind’s capacity to comprehend truth. The other two are referenced in our last citation from Proverbs. The virtue of knowledge helps us to grasp factual data about the world around us. Also known as the virtue of science (scire being Latin for “to know”), we can see through the modern enterprise of science how this virtue seeks to grasp causes and effects, to see how things work in the natural world. The virtue of understanding perfects our comprehension of principles, such as the general laws of nature that make sense of and explain all kinds of particular causes and effects. Wisdom, though, sits at the pinnacle of the edifice of intellectual virtue. Thomas tells us that both knowledge and understanding “depend on wisdom, as obtaining the highest place, and containing beneath itself understanding and science, by judging both of the conclusions of science, and of the principles on which they are based” (I-II, 57, 2).
Philosophy means the philos (love) of sophia (wisdom), and as wisdom exceeds knowledge, so does the philosophical discipline of metaphysics exceed the natural sciences. It examines what is meta (beyond) phusis (nature). It seeks the highest of all causes and the principal of all principles, which Aristotle, like St. Thomas Aquinas, called God. Aristotle wrote that it is better to know a little about sublime things than a great deal about trivial things. (He accepted only the best when it came to knowledge!) Indeed, the pagan Aristotle, who lived before Christ, called metaphysics the most “honorable” science and even the “divine” science, because it seeks out the things of God. He notes that “such a science either God alone can have, or God above all others.”7
Metaphysics is the study of being itself, the commonality and underlying foundation of all creatures and phenomena studied by any science. Don’t worry, though. I’m not saying that we must all become professional philosophical metaphysicians. Aristotle and Aquinas were the best the world has seen, and Thomas, in particular, is a totally trustworthy guide to the kind of “divine wisdom” we need to achieve the goal of our first life lesson.
St. Thomas knew something, though, about the highest of all forms of wisdom that Aristotle did not. Three centuries after Aristotle’s death, the Logos, the Word of God, became man; Wisdom Itself took on flesh and became incarnate (John 1:14). Wisdom Incarnate, the God-man Jesus Christ, promised us a “Spirit” who would guide us to all truth (John 16:13), and that Spirit of Truth came, as promised, on Pentecost (Acts 2). Christ revealed to us that the one God whom Aristotle’s reason leads to is also three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Further, the Holy Trinity gives us access to divine wisdom in a way the wisest of philosophers did not know. This “wisdom from above” (James 3:17) is given to us among the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the “spirits” or gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord (Isa. 11:2). When we cooperate with these gracious gifts of the Holy Spirit, our virtues come to be governed not merely by our human reason, but by the stirrings of the Holy Spirit. The virtues are the oars with which we row our way up the stream toward heaven, and the gifts are the infinitely more powerful winds beneath our sails, if we are willing to unfurl them.
We’ll elaborate on the gifts in life lessons that lie ahead, but for now I will highlight two. Thomas, like other great theologians before him, notes that the order of these gifts as listed in Scripture runs from the highest or greatest to the least or lowest, as they descend from heaven toward man. When arranged from the least to the greatest, they act like a spiritual Jacob’s ladder ascending from the earth and reaching unto heaven (Gen. 28:12). Again and again Scripture buttresses this view that, to reach wisdom at the top of the ladder, we must begin with the first rung, fear of the Lord:
Note, too, how this corresponds with our own “lesson plans.” Once we have penetrated the principle that the meaning of life is to attain God, our next step is to pulverize the sins and errors that keep us from Him. That very dread of sin is a manifestation of our fear of the Lord. At first, we fear to commit sins that would lead God to punish us, and as we progress up the spiritual ladder we come to love God so much that we fear to commit sins that would let Him down. Thomas calls this the progression from servile to filial (loving) fear. This fear of sin is the first step up the ladder of the gifts that helps us to attain wisdom, which resides at the very top. The virtue of wisdom perfects our natural, intellectual life as guided by our reason; the Holy Spirit’s gift of wisdom perfects our supernatural, spiritual life, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Thomas says the gift of wisdom, like the virtue of wisdom, regards the highest realms of knowledge, but it surpasses the realm of reason alone and perfects us in the matters of the truths of faith, “to know them in themselves, by a kind of union with them” (II-II, 9, 2). Further, because “wisdom as a gift is more excellent than wisdom as an intellectual virtue, since it attains to God more intimately by a kind of union of the soul with Him, it is able to direct us not only in contemplation, but in action” (II-II, 45, 3). The gift of wisdom, then, is God’s greatest gift to our intellect to help us to attain Him as best as we can on earth and to enjoy His presence forever in heaven. It keeps our eyes on our goal and directs the actions of our daily lives in order to help us reach it.
Thomas tells us, though, that this magnificent gift of wisdom “flows” into our souls through the God-given theological virtue of charity. St. Paul tells us of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity (agape, caritas, or love) in 1 Corinthians 13. He tells us as well that charity is the greatest among them. To know God is to love Him. When God graces us with the charity that allows us to love Him most fully, He graces our minds with gifts such as wisdom so that we will come to know Him ever more deeply.
Note again, as Thomas said, that “the ultimate and principal good of man is the enjoyment of God” (italics added). Thomas defines joy itself as the effect or result of the love of charity. When we seek out something we love, we experience desire, and when we attain the object of our love, we rest in the enjoyment of it. “Joy is compared to desire as rest to movement” (II-II, 28, 3). When we attain God, our restlessness is ended and our joy is complete. As to this perfect joy and its relationship to wisdom and charity, Thomas notes: “The joy of charity is joy about the Divine wisdom. Now such like joy has no admixture of sorrow, according to Wisdom 8:16: ‘Her conversation hath no bitterness’ ” (II-II, 28, 2).
Wisdom and charity are certainly fundamental to meaningful earthly lives and to eternal lives of beatitude in heaven. To accept these supernatural virtues and gifts is indeed to accept the very best. Let’s turn now to our next lesson plan to show the means God has given us to acquire and use them to their fullest.
Lifting Our Hearts and Minds to God
We move now to our fourth lesson plan, the fourth P, Pray. How can we attain the most rightly coveted gift of wisdom? St. James tells us quite plainly: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives to all men generously and without reproaching, and it will be given him” (James 1:5). It could hardly be simpler! Still, James counsels us to ask God with faith and without doubting, lest we be “like a wave on the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind” (1:6). He warns us further about being like a “double-minded man, unstable in all his ways” (1:7). Such a person will not receive anything from God.
Per St. Thomas, prayer is “the raising up of one’s mind to God” (II-II, 83, 17), and asking God for gifts, as James tells us, is one of the key parts of prayer, that of supplications (humble requests) for particular blessings, another being thanksgivings for blessings that He has already provided. Wisdom perfects our reason, and Thomas tells us that prayer is “spoken reason” (oris ratio) (II-II, 83, 1). Further, we learn new truths from teachers, and in prayer we speak and open ourselves to the lessons of the Teacher with a capital T, who is Truth with a capital T.8
Note, too, James’s warnings about doubt and double-mindedness. If we experience doubt, the very act of prayer is an act of faith to counter it, and we can also ask God through our prayer to cure us of any lingering doubts. As for the double-mindedness that allows us to be tossed about by winds like waves on the sea, see how this relates to the false views of secularism and the sin of spiritual sloth, so prevalent in our day. When our minds are torn between the “wisdom from above” (James 3:17) and the foolish “wisdom of the world” (1 Cor. 3:19) we are whipped about hither and thither by the winds of popular culture, rather than guided along to our goals through the breathings of the Holy Spirit.
Prayer itself helps us progress in the spiritual life by focusing our sights more clearly on the enjoyment of God. Through prayer we reach up to God and allow Him to reach down to us. Powerful prayer may take the form of spontaneous conversation with God or may be expressed through formal prayers handed down to us through the saints, through the Church, or even directly from Christ. (See Matthew 6:9–15, although I’d wager you already know it.) I’ll leave the spontaneous prayer up to you, but here I will suggest a few formal prayers to help us keep focused on our ultimate life lesson.
Not everyone may think of this first little prayer as a prayer, even though it, like the Our Father, derives from the words of Christ. I speak of the simple Sign of the Cross. In this prayer, we echo Christ, who told His disciples to baptize people of all nations, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19). St. Paul has advised us “pray constantly” (1 Thess. 5:17), and this simple prayer and gesture can easily be repeated countless times throughout the day to help keep our hearts and minds on our goal of God.
As for the virtues and the gifts that help us to live lives focused on God, I’ll provide a few snippets from a prayer that St. Thomas crafted to ask God for the virtues:
O God,
all powerful and all-knowing,
without beginning and without end,
You Who are,
the source,
the sustainer,
and the rewarder of all virtues,
Grant that I may
abide on the firm ground of faith,
be sheltered by an impregnable shield of hope,
and be adorned in the bridal garment of charity. . . .
Plant in me, Lord, all the virtues,
that I might be
devout in divine matters,
discerning in human affairs. . . .
Order me inwardly through a good life,
that I might do
what is right
and what will be
meritorious for me
and a good example for others. . . .
Amen.9
I’ll conclude here with the conclusion of Thomas’s prayer for the attainment of heaven, the ultimate goal of life lesson 1:
Give me, O Lord my God,
that life without death,
and that joy without sorrow
where there is
the greatest freedom,
unconfined security,
delightful happiness,
happy eternity,
the vision of truth,
and praise, O God.
Amen.10
Special Aids to Crush Sin and to Cultivate the Virtues and Gifts
God is so infinitely generous to us that through the Incarnation and the Sacrifice of His Son, He has provided us with additional supernatural aids that not only “take away the defects consequent on past sins,” but “perfect the soul in things pertaining to Divine Worship” (III, 62, 5). Further,
Just as the virtues and gifts confer, in addition to grace commonly so called, a certain special perfection ordained to the powers’ proper actions, so does sacramental grace confer, over and above grace commonly so called, and in addition to the virtues and gifts, a certain Divine assistance in obtaining the end of the sacrament. It is thus that sacramental grace confers something in addition to the grace of the virtues and gifts. (III, 62, 2)
Now, sacramental grace is, of course, the stuff of the seven sacraments that the Church teaches and bestows. These sacraments are Baptism, Confirmation, Reconciliation, Matrimony, Holy Orders, Anointing of the Sick, and, chief among them, the Eucharist. Thomas explains that the sacraments were given to the Church by Christ. Indeed, they “flowed from the side of Christ . . . hanging on the cross” (III, 64, 2). A sacrament “is defined as being the sign of a holy thing so far as it makes men holy” (III, 60, 2). Sacraments are special instruments of God’s grace that include a visible, material element, such as the water of Baptism, because “it is part of man’s nature to acquire knowledge of the intelligible from the sensible” (III, 60, 4). The water we can see with our eyes signifies the immaterial, spiritual grace we can grasp only with our intellects when transformed by faith.
The sacraments also incorporate and give special power to prayer, since a second element of a sacrament is the use of particular words that signify the Word of God. Indeed, “considered in regard to the cause of the sanctification, which is the Word incarnate; to Whom the sacraments have a certain conformity in that that word is joined to the sensible signs, just as in the mystery of the Incarnation the Word of God is united to the sensible flesh” (III, 60, 6).
Sacraments are necessary for our salvation. Thomas reminds us that Christ told us, “unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). This rebirth takes place in the sacrament of Baptism. The words that provide the form of this sacrament come straight from Christ, when He told His disciples to baptize all nations with the words we all memorialize in the aforementioned Sign of the Cross. During the Catholic baptismal rite, the priest, while pouring water over the recipient or immersing the recipient in water three times, proclaims “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
The sacraments “effect what they signify” (III, 60, 1), and this is of the utmost importance in relation to our first life lesson. Thomas calls Baptism the “door of the sacraments” (III, 63, 6). While St. John the Baptist baptized with water, Christ, who is the door (John 10:9), gave us Baptism with the Holy Spirit, which opens for us the door to the Kingdom of God.
We will look at all seven sacraments in the pages ahead and see how, when we participate in them, they help perfect us in living each life lesson. For now, we might pause for just a minute, to think that every time we make the Sign of the Cross, we remind ourselves that the heavenly door has been opened to us through God’s grace in Baptism. It is up to us to choose whether we will cooperate with His grace, if we will take the hand of Wisdom Incarnate and walk through it to see which room the King of Heaven has prepared for us (John 14:2), each room with a marvelous view of all creation, and of creation’s Creator.
Life Lesson 1 Summa11
To accept only the best means that we will strive to keep in mind that the ultimate end, goal, and ordering principle in our lives will be the attainment of eternal bliss with God in heaven. Our goal will be served in our daily lives on earth by our reminding ourselves that only God can remove our restlessness, that we must conquer the deadly sin of spiritual sloth, become immune to the cultural calls toward secularization, strive to grow in the virtue of charity and the gift of wisdom, pray every day for God’s assistance, and embrace with gratitude the graces of all of the sacraments, so that one day we may smile upon God in the unspeakable bliss of the Beatific Vision.
3 You can take a peek at it here, if you’d like: “Dr. Kevin Vost: The Meaning of Life . . . and the Virtuous Keys,” Excellence Reporter, May 9, 2018, https://excellencereporter.com/2018/05/09/dr-kevin-vost-the-meaning-of-life-and-the-virtuous-keys/. (My debt to St. Thomas, as usual, should be quite evident.)
4 A political form of the secularization we’ll examine in this section.
5 Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). Chapter 6 is titled “Envy” and chapter 7, “The Sense of Sin.”
6 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Suicide Rates Rising across the U.S.,” CDC, https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/p0607-suicide-prevention.html.
7 Metaphysics, bk. 1, chap. 2, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1555.
8 Truth from the human perspective is the correspondence between reality and our understanding of it, conformity between thing and thought. Not only do created things conform or correspond to God’s thought, but “His act of understanding is the measure and cause of every other being and intellect.” Truth does not merely exist in God, as it can in us, but “He is truth itself, and the sovereign and first truth” (ST, I, 16, 5). For us, thinking does not make it so. For God, it does!
9 Robert Anderson and Johann Moser, trans. and eds., The Aquinas Prayer Book: The Prayers and Hymns of St. Thomas (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2000), 33; 37–39.
10 Ibid, p. 57.
11 We’ll conclude every chapter with a simple summary of the chapter’s life lessons. As a nod to St. Thomas, we’ll call each summary a “summa,” but rest easy: whereas his Summa Theologica runs over one and a half million words, our summaries will rarely exceed one or two hundred words.