We don’t often think of The Roman Catholic Church as the spiritual equivalent of a science fiction anti-gravity gizmo, but it is. It keeps the souls of the faithful floating above sin, stopping the awful descent into error that ruins the eternities of those who fall. Every single Sacrament is designed to keep us moving toward Him, away from the inanimate energies and programmed entities within which we are intentionally programmed.
When we consider our own propensity to sin, and realize that God’s grace keeps us from downloading and operating with soul-destroying thoughts, words, and deeds, we can only be thankful to have been spared. The Church encourages us to operate with an upward focus that draws us away from sin and error. Most of the people in the world operate on a horizontal basis, and avoid sin without drawing as close to The Programmer as they otherwise might.
As we work to get our individual program in line with His Operating Instructions, we see the advantages of poverty, celibacy, and obedience. The opposites of those things cannot help but distract us from He Who programmed all that there is. Today’s reading, from Isaiah, 45, tells us: “Turn to me and be safe,
all you ends of the earth, for I am God; there is no other!”
Turning to Him and being safe means moving upwards, not sideways or down. That turn will keep us safe from the relentless pull of the “spiritual gravity” that works to pull us down into the pits of despair and pain. It is not only a turn that we must make once. Many of us must resist temptation several times an hour, struggling to keep ourselves turned upward, and moving upward, toward He Who programmed us and wants us to spend eternity with Him. Nothing on earth helps us to move higher than The Roman Catholic Church.
As we watch a bubble shimmering, we see the fluid in it slowly settling toward the bottom, pulled there by gravity. If the bubble is made to rotate, the film is moved toward the top, where it immediately begins to settle toward the bottom. If the bubble continually rotates so that the film-thickness is uniformly maintained, it will go on and on.
Our soul, similarly, has a tendency to be drawn into the sin that will destroy it. It must be kept at all times moving toward God, rotating as it does so in order that every part of it may be continually exposed to He Who kindly and graciously programmed it within the vast body of corrupting sin.
