Christ, King of Families

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Many years ago, I had a wonderful plumber who was always there when I needed him. Nothing was too much trouble, both night and day, on weekends, and even on holidays, when he never charged more than the current rate. Sad to say, I never really appreciated him. He was just the man I turned to when I had trouble with my plumbing.

Then, one day, his little boy was taken ill at school and he dashed off to bring him home, forgetting his tool box. As I picked it up to take it to his home, I saw these words written on the underside of the lid: Ad maiorem Dei gloriam—“For the greater glory of God.” I had taken such little interest in him that I did not even know that he was a Catholic. When I did come to know him and his wife and his family, it was to know the closest that I had ever come to a replication on earth of the family of God’s love in Heaven.

Western readers with no knowledge of the Semitic mind and culture that was steeped in the meaning and understanding of signs and symbols fail to see the significance of what happened when Christ changed water into wine at the marriage feast at Cana. One of the most prominent Catholic journalists in England once said to me, “I cannot understand why, after being baptized in the River Jordan, Christ went off to a wedding in a remote Galilean village instead of immediately beginning the public ministry for which He had just been prepared.” His Greco-Roman classical mindset could only see this visit to a wedding as a sort of trivial and dispensable feast after His trials in the desert and His baptism in the Jordan.

The true reason why Christ went to the Marriage Feast of Cana was to show that the Kingdom that He said would be coming soon would be based on ordinary Catholic families and a new form of hybrid love that would be generated there, where ordinary human love would be suffused and then transformed by divine love. That was the meaning of the changing of the water into wine—to symbolize that in the Kingdom that was coming soon the family would be paramount.

It would be paramount because it would be there that the divine love received in baptism would mix, mingle, and merge with ordinary human love to produce a quality of supernatural love that had never been seen before. When it was experienced by a decadent pagan world, this love that was the wine of the New Kingdom on earth would transform a pagan empire into a Christian empire in such a short time that it still baffles secular historians.

The only way to evangelize the modern pagan world today would be once again through the family. If we do not realize this, then our enemies do—and that is why they are trying to undermine and destroy the family which stands in the way of the neo-pagan world they want to reconstitute. Here, selflessness is replaced by selfishness, love is replaced by lust, and doing God’s will is replaced by doing your own will: doing whatever you want, in whatever way you want, whenever you want. It may be too late for the wild geese to save Rome this time round, for the barbarians are already within the gates! But it is not too late for the families who once transformed a pagan world into a Catholic world to do so once more—and this time to make sure that the forces of evil do not reemerge to destroy it, or at least distort and disunite what once had been one in Christ.

In the profound prayer that was the heart and soul of early Catholic Spirituality, God’s love was characterized by three essential operations. It liberated, differentiated, and divinized. It liberated early Christians from the powerful forces of evil that not only surrounded them but imprisoned them from within. Then it differentiated each one of them as individual and unique masterpieces of God’s creation; for love, of its very nature, differentiates. Finally, it divinized them, as the divine love that progressively possesses them in Christ enabled them to be united with Him in His contemplation of the Father, as the prelude to the union with Himself for which God originally created us. In the early Church, this came to be called divinization.

Although Christ was their model and had to face the powers of evil that they, too, had to face in the world that surrounded Him, He did not have to face the evil of original sin deep within them, in what Freud later called the unconscious or the “Id.” But just as Christ descended into Hell after His glorification, He was always there to go down with them, to destroy the powers of evil that had homed themselves in the nether regions of their unpurified personalities.

But something truly wonderful happens as that infused divine love is given free reign within us, enabling us to grow into our true selves that sin has destroyed. Then, in gradually becoming our true selves, we all become different from one another. Sin and selfishness make us all the same, love and selflessness make us all different.

If I were to show you a handful of seeds, you would find it very difficult to distinguish them from one another, as they are all turned in within themselves. But plant them in good soil, water them, and expose them and as the sun shines on them to bring them into bloom, they all become different, unique, and unrepeatable masterworks of God’s creation. Exactly the same happens to us.

We say people are the same the world over, and they are, at least self-centered sinful human beings are. But give them good soil, a daily spirituality similar in our day to that of the early Christians in their day, open them to the same sacramental life that they experienced, and then radically open them to the love of God in prayer. Then you will see that the more we become possessed by the love of God, we all become different, distinctive expressions of the love of God, who made all of us to become totally unique materializations of His glory on earth.

And that is precisely why God created us, for the same reason that God created the masterwork of His creation: Our Lord, Christ the King. It is in His image and likeness that we were originally created, both physically and spiritually, to give glory to God—glory to Him in all we say, and do, and become, like Christ before us. Then, as we radically open ourselves to the transforming, transfiguring, and, finally, the transporting love of God, we finally attain divinization, beginning even in this life the journey into the love of God that has no end this side of eternity.

That is why St. Irenaeus said, “The greatest glory to God on earth is man fully alive.” First, of course, he is referring to Christ the King, the Masterpiece of God’s creation; but he is also referring to those other minor masterpieces of His creation, who in imitation of Christ radically open themselves, through repentance, prayer, and self-sacrifice, to the all-enveloping, all-consuming, and all-powerful love of God. It is this utterly transcendent and infinite love that makes all things different, unique, and unrepeatable masterworks of His creation, to give God glory by becoming what only His love can make of them.

When I finally came to know my plumber’s children, I was surprised to see that although each one of them physically resembled their parents in one way or another, each was totally different, thanks to the divine love they received through their parents. Marriage is different from all other sacraments because the married couple themselves are the ministers of this sacrament. This does not just mean on their wedding day but on every day that they express their selfless love for one another in such a way that this love overflows onto and into their children.

This love is demonstrated most particularly by the way they lead their children to come to know and love God for themselves through daily prayer. This is how, in the early Church, families became the vital living expressions to the pagan world of the glory of God alive on earth, in them. These pagans wanted their families to be set alight by the same inner fire that burned in them, and they wanted their children to become animated by what the fire of love did for those who followed what Christians came to call “The Way.” Unknown to them, but known only too well to the first Christians, everything depended on the imitation of Jesus Christ, their Lord and King. He showed the way, and they followed.

From the very beginning, Jesus said that He had come to do the will of His Father, and the Father’s will was that He should love Him, with His whole heart and mind, with His whole body and soul, and with His whole strength. Doing this enabled Him to receive His Father’s love in return, so that He became the most secure, the most mature, the most perfect—and so the most lovable—person who has ever lived, who was then empowered to live and die so that others might follow Him, The Way, The Truth, and The Life.

After the outpouring of the love that Christ had received from His Father on the first Pentecost day, all those who were open to receive that love were taken up into a new place. It was not into another physical place but a new spiritual place within the Mystical and Glorified Body of Christ the King, to begin a journey. That is why Christ the King was called “The Way.” He was also called “The Truth” because in Him they traveled onward into God, by offering to God the true offering that Christ offered before them. This offering was the offering of themselves, within the One who had offered Himself and who continued to offer Himself to God the Father. Finally, He was called “The Life” because all who travel in, with, and through Him, continually receive the same Divine Life and Love that animated Him.

In this way, Christ’s prayer at the Last Supper was fulfilled because all who were open to receive Him were united together as one, as Christ their King was one with His Father (John 17:21-22). It was in this way—seeing them replete, resplendent, and radioactive with the glory of God that shone in and through every member of their families—that the pagan Roman world   came to believe. What I came to see in my plumber, in the way he offered everything he said and did to the glory of God, replicated in his family, was what God would like to see in every Catholic family—because that is precisely why He created us in the first place. That is, that all and everything that we say and do is done for the greater glory of God—Ad maiorem Dei gloriam. And in doing this, we all gradually rise to become our true selves from the spiritual and psychological bankruptcy to which sin and selfishness have reduced us.

This is the first principle of the spiritual life, which I will continue to detail in the New Year so that we can make the Jubilee Year what God wants it to become (despite those who have other ideas): namely, the way back to coming to know and live once more the true Catholic Tradition that can alone return us to the Faith of our Fathers.

Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (December 2024).

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The featured image is “The Wedding at Cana” (circa 1686) by Giuseppe Maria Crespi, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.