Staying on Christ's Path

Second Sunday after Easter

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Generally there are two kinds of people in life: those who blaze trails and those who stay on the trails that have already been laid out.  In our own American psyche we tend to elevate those who blaze trails.  Think of Lewis and Clark, cutting a path through the wilderness as Sacajawea helped them to explore the Louisiana Purchase.  Or think of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.  Certainly there is more danger for those who “boldly go where no man has gone before" (to quote Star Trek), but there is also generally more excitement as you see and experience things that no one has experienced before.
    Contrast this glorification of those who make their own trails with what we heard St. Peter say in his first epistle about Christ, who left us, “an example that you should follow in his footsteps.”  Our first pontiff is not encouraging us to make a new trail, but to follow in the one that Christ made, He who is the shepherd and guardian of our souls (the Greek and Latin word is bishop or overseer).  We are not to make our own way on the path of salvation, but to follow Christ.
    This, of course, does not signify an aping of everything Christ did.  We don’t have to pack up and leave Michigan for the Holy Land, and wander on foot around Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Capernaum.  The way in which Christ wants us follow Him means that we seek to conform our lives to His in our own vocations and jobs.  And we do this because He has not only blazed the trail for us, but He is the trail for us, as He says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life [emphasis mine].” 
    There is only one way to the Father, and that is through Christ, as He also said at the Last Supper: “No one comes to the Father except through me.”  If there were other ways to salvation, then Christ’s suffering would have been superfluous.  The trails that others blaze lead to wolves and bad pastures.  The trail that Christ lays out for us leads us to safety and green pastures.  Our way needs to be Christ’s way, or it is no way to heaven at all.  As my spiritual director has often been quoted as saying, Frank Sinatra’s hit, “I Did It My Way” is the theme song of Hell.
    But despite Christ laying out a clear path for us, and instructing us to follow Him, others throughout the centuries, and even we to this day, continue to try to forge our own path to happiness.  Whether we’re blazing a trail ourselves, or simply following other teachers or gurus, we do not always follow Christ.  And part of that is because following Christ involves sacrifice.  St. Peter demonstrates this for us as he reminds us that Christ suffered for us, and that the path of Christ that we are to follow involves setting aside vengeance when others make us suffer, and even includes the cross.  Our lives are not all suffering and pain, but to follow Christ means that we will experience suffering and pain from time to time, because that is what happened with Christ. 
    So we try to find ways that are easier, that do not involve pain or suffering.  But when we do that, when we seek to avoid pain at all costs, we find ourselves among wolves who are ready to devour us.  Recently, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith came out with a document, Dignitas infinita, which treats offenses that go against the dignity of the human person.  One of those offenses is in vitro fertilization, or IVF.  There is real pain in wanting to conceive a child and the body not responding accordingly.  Not just for women, but especially for women, the ability to bear a child correlates closely with her feeling of self-worth.  And the voices of the hirelings who tell couples that God would want them to conceive a child in any manner because it would make them happy, or that God wouldn’t want a person to undergo pain, tempts like the voice of a siren.  But IVF makes a child a commodity to be acquired at any cost, requires the sin of self-stimulation of the man, and introduces a doctor as the material agent of conception.  Often, with IVF, many embryos are implanted in the woman’s womb, in case some don’t take, but if multiple do, abortions are encouraged to make sure the body isn’t overwhelmed.  The whole process includes many acts contrary to God’s will. 
    The path that Christ has blazed may involve not getting what a couple exactly wants, but it leads to heaven.  And it opens up opportunities for adoption, or simply being an uncle or aunt that can shower that love on nieces and nephews.  And most importantly, it keeps one on the path to heaven, which is the destination of the path of Christ.
    Dignitas infinita also treats gender dysphoria and its many manifestations.  It demonstrates that attempting to change a person’s God-given biological sex through hormones or mutilating surgery does not lead to true happiness, since it seeks to contravene God’s plan.  Instead, the document encourages understanding the deep psychosexual wounds that can lead a person to think that he or she is in the wrong kind of body or is sexually attracted to a person of the same sex.  What seems easier is to allow a person to determine how he or she wants to express the self.  It can definitely feel easier to live out of wounds because they feel so familiar, even if they do not give us wholeness. 
    Instead, the path that Christ lays out is starting with the fact that God does not make mistakes, and that if He made us male or female, that is part of His plan for us.  It also includes extra love and attention to help a person uncover the sources of those wounds and work through them to find integration of the whole person.  That work of dealing with wounds is often very painful, just like it would be physically painful to clean out an infected cut.  But it leads to a greater happiness than ignoring the problem or treating the problem like normalcy could ever achieve. 

    And, in spite of our failings, of any kind, whether those mentioned in Dignitas infinita or any other sins that we may have committed, the good news is that our Lord is the Good Shepherd who seeks after us, not just calling out with His voice, but even tracking us down in the wilderness of sin, and putting us upon His shoulders so that we don’t even have to walk back on our own.  Christ does not want us to wander away, but if we make that error, He will always search after us and seek to bring us back to His path, as long as we have breath in us.
    There is a place and a time for blazing our own paths and trails.  If sailors had never crossed the Atlantic, or the first Americans had never crossed the Appalachians, or Lewis and Clark would have never explored the Louisiana Purchase, then where would we be as a country?  But when it comes to our salvation, Christ desires not that we make our own trail, because it doesn’t lead to where He created us to be, but that we follow the example He left us.  He calls to us in love, as the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God for ever and ever.  Amen.