The Dignity of Man
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
(Proofread)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
“And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let the birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens’” (Gen. 1:20).
Yesterday and today the Church places before us the whole story of creation, which is very beautiful. The account of it in Genesis is very poetic.
It helps us to realize all the great things that God has done in creating the world and all the things in the world. “God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind” (Gen. 1:21).
Often we hear about people studying various animals, big ones, small ones, an enormous variety of creatures that God created in the world. People can get very interested in a particular type of animal or a particular species.
You find there is an enormous variety of birds, of fish, of all sorts of things. You see the mind of God was full of all sorts of wonderful ideas when He created the world.
It’s also very interesting for us to see that when we look around at the whole of creation and the world and the things we see, that there is a Being behind all of this, an omnipotent Being who is able to do everything.
There is a plan in creation, there is an order in creation, there is a certain order in the world. And that’s a very beautiful order.
St. Thomas Aquinas said that from looking at the things that God has created, that leads us to the Author of creation (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Five Ways).
It’s like when you look at this table, from just looking at the table you know an awful lot of things about the carpenter. You know that he knew how to make a table and that it’s fairly stable and you can put things on it. He put the right color and he didn’t paint it pink with blue spots, a number of very simple things.
But the person knew what he was doing; he knew what it was for. You know a certain amount about the carpenter from looking at the table.
From looking at the whole of creation, we also come to know about the Carpenter, the person who made the whole of creation. And therefore, it’s a very good thing to stop occasionally in our day and in our life and to contemplate all these wonderful things, to be silent for a while.
One spiritual author says, “The wonders of creation are silent, and we can admire them only in silence” (Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, Point 24).
Last Sunday in the Gospel we’re told how Our Lord withdrew from the crowds early in the morning, “went off to a lonely place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35). Christ also sought to be in silence occasionally.
We need silence. Silence to be able to think about the bigger things, the greater picture, to ask ourselves those key questions which Pope St. John Paul said every human person has to keep asking themselves:
Where have I come from? Where am I going? What is my life all about?
We need silence to do that, to withdraw on ourselves, on our own for a while, in prayer, and to talk to this great Author of creation and to ask Him about our role in this whole creation.
What is our purpose? Why have you brought me into being? What do I have to contribute? Why have you brought me to this place or to this particular situation that I am in my life, in my studies, the plan of my life, the road of my life? (cf. John Paul II, Encyclical, Fides et Ratio, Point 1, September 14, 1988).
There are answers there. God wants to reveal these to us through people, through places, through creation. “Creation itself,” said that same author, “is a silent word of God” (Robert Sarah, ibid., Point 162).
We are surrounded by creation, the birds that sing, the dogs that bark, the trees that grow, the grass that grows. “The grass grows in silence,” said a particular saint (Teresa of Calcutta, A Gift for God). The trees grow in silence. Many things in this world happen in silence.
“God works in silence” (Robert Sarah, ibid., Point 291). He reveals to us the purpose of our life in silence.
He says, “The wordless beauty of nature displays before our eyes the manifold riches of a Father who is ceaselessly present among men” (ibid., Point 162). We look around us, the beauty of creation, we’re led to discover God and to discover a loving Father who makes creation so beautiful.
We discover His “manifold riches, ceaselessly present among men,” even when we might think that God is absent, then that’s when He’s most present.
“This divine speech is not audible to ears that are too human; nevertheless, it is the most profound speech of all” (ibid.).
God speaks to us through creation, but He also speaks to us in the depth of our soul.
The speech that’s “not audible to our ears,” but yet it’s audible by the heart. We listen with the ears of our heart.
And if we’re a bit too human, or a bit too materialistic, or a bit too stuck on the things that God has created, rather than the Person who made them, then we may fail to see. We may be a bit blind. Welcome to the world in which we live. We’re a bit blind to the deeper realities.
“And God saw that it was good” (Gen. 1:9,12,18,21,25). All throughout creation we have this idea repeated, that God saw the basic goodness of creation.
Everything He created was good, so the world is good. The world is not bad, the world is not evil, although sometimes you might get that impression.
But there’s an inherent goodness in every person, in every situation. Part of our calling is to draw out that goodness in all sorts of ways.
Lord, let me see, open my eyes to this great reality, the wonderful things that you want me to see and to discover, the loving hand of Our Father God, in all the little ways that His plans touch us.
He says, “The sun, the moon, and the stars are absolutely silent to our ears” (Robert Sarah, ibid., Point 162). It’s interesting when you think about it, how silent the world is: the great things that happen every day—the sun coming up, the grass growing.
“But they are a word and a message essential to our earthly existence. There is a language of the stars that we can neither know nor comprehend but that God understands perfectly” (ibid.).
This great God of ours, the loving Father, is behind the whole of creation, making things happen, making the sun come up every day, helping us to wake up every morning, giving us the energy and the power that allows us to study or do this job or that job.
“The silence of God,” he says, “is understood by faith, in meditation on the communion that can exist between him and men” (ibid., Point 165).
We only come to understand these great realities in silent prayer before Our God, to discover Him behind the whole of creation.
“And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’ And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.
“And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.’ And it was so” (Gen. 1:22-24).
All that was needed for something to happen was for God to want it. Let this be or let this happen and there it was.
We know that Our Father God is behind everything that is taking place in the world, inviting us to a deeper faith. Lord, increase my faith in your loving hand.
“And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good” (Gen. 1:25).
Lord, help me to see the basic goodness in everything, to thank you for it. When we look at the greatness of creation around us, that can lead us to many acts of thanksgiving. We can spend the whole of our life in an act of thanksgiving—thanksgiving for all the good things, for the ways that God is acting.
I remember the story many years ago about a farmer in the north of Ireland. There was a lot of trouble during a semi-civil war and his son was very much involved in revolutionary activities and his son was put in prison.
This elderly farmer relied very much on that son to work the farm. He couldn’t work it anymore.
He wrote to his son in prison and said, ‘I really miss you around the farm because now it’s the time to plant the potatoes. I’ve no one to plant the potatoes. I’m too old to dig the back field.’
A couple of days later, the son wrote back to the father and said, ‘Oh, don’t touch the back field because that’s where I hid the guns.’
The father wrote back and said, ‘Something very unusual happened the other day. I received your letter and then two or three days later, in the middle of the night, three truckloads of British Army soldiers drove up to the farm and spent a whole pile of hours digging the back field.’
The father wrote back to the son, ‘I was a bit surprised by all of this. I don’t know what’s happening.’ The son wrote back and said, ‘Now you can plant the potatoes.’
God works in all sorts of ways. Our loving Father God solves our problems in ways that sometimes we can’t and don’t understand.
“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’” (Gen. 1:26).
This is the high point of creation: the creation of man. Pope St. John Paul liked to say that man is God’s greatest work (cf. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, Point 84, March 25, 1995).
Man is way above the animals. One of the essential messages of the social teaching of the Catholic Church is about the dignity of every human person (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Point 1700).
If you look carefully in this house, you’ll find that message portrayed in all sorts of ways: in the way we do things, in the care and cleanliness that we try to take of everything. The material things of the house try to transmit that message: the way we speak to each other, the way we care for each other, the way certain things are done in Kibondeni and other places.
Every institution of the Catholic Church tries to transmit that message, basic key idea: the dignity of the human person.
We try to address with dignity, we try to talk with dignity, we try to teach other people with dignity, because the human person is a great person, the greatest creation of God.
And every human person then is important, whether they are young or old; whether they are in the womb, or whether they are elderly; whether they have this talent or they lack that talent; whether they are handicapped, physically or mentally.
I spent two and a half hours yesterday interviewing an elderly Irish priest who was in a hospice in Teguio, who came here in 1952 (which is even before I was born). He was one of the first priests to go to West Pokot.
He spent something like twenty-five years in West Pokot. Fascinating. We spent two and a half hours recording his stories of what he did in West Pokot, how he mentored these people.
Of course they had no formation. He said they had “no education, no medication, and no Revelation.” He was sort of there to try and bring all of those things, which over the course of twenty-five years they did. They built schools, they built hospitals, they converted the people, they brought Christ to them.
He had some wonderful stories. Fascinating. He said, “When we got the schools going and some of the hospitals, we saw that there were handicapped children who were hidden in families. They were hidden at the back of the house. People were ashamed of them.
“We were able to set up a school and we got people to go and talk to these families and say, ‘Bring us your children. We can look after them, and we can teach them a trade, and they can do something useful.’
“The families were just very happy to get rid of them. They used the word taka taka. ‘We would kick them,’ they said, ‘they’re useless, we don’t need them. They’re not good for anything, they can’t work.’”
They brought the children to these homes and they taught them things and they educated them, and then people opened their eyes to see: they’re able to do things, they’re able to be educated.
You see, that’s a very concrete expression of the teaching of the Catholic Church that every human person is valuable. They have dignity. And they have dignity because they have a body and they have a soul, and that soul has an eternal destiny. That’s why we have to take care of our souls.
One of the key messages of staying in this house, the care of our soul, through the sacraments, through living in the state of grace, through growing in our knowledge of God and of the things he has done—because that soul has an eternal destiny. It’s destined for heaven.
And listening to this 95-year-old holy priest yesterday, there were amazing things he had done in his life and he was so happy, so fulfilled.
I said at the end of the interview, “You know, if you had to live your life all over again, would you do the same things?”
He said, “Immediately! Here at the end of my life I’m so happy, I’m so fulfilled, I’ve seen all the wonderful things that God has done in me and through me. And I’m just a nobody,” he said, “but God has used me to help these people to be happy, to help them to have education and medication and Revelation.”
And you could see he’s like the happiest man on the planet, he’s like a little kid, looking forward to his eternal destiny.
But what a wonderful thing when we come to the end of our life to be able to look back and say: this world is a better place for the fact that I have lived here. God has used me in a special way to lift up the lives of other people.
It’s a great way to live in spite of all the difficulties—and there were many difficulties and challenges in his life, all sorts of things they had to do. But in the end God triumphs.
This idea is very much the center of the whole of Christian teaching: “let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26).
The animals are not created in the image and likeness of God. Sometimes in modern culture we sort of lift up the animals to be very important. Certainly, in the Western world we’re worried about all the animals, the elephants and the lions and the tigers, but sometimes we don’t care about human babies, about the baby in the womb, who are human persons.
Abortion is sort of taken for granted, but “let’s save the animals.” Very often man is brought down to the level of the animals; he’s just another animal, and if he’s inconvenient, let’s get rid of him. But that denies the dignity of every human person, of every baby in the womb, of every elderly person.
That’s why the Catholic Church is so much involved in education and in health care, caring for people.
That particular place where this elderly priest is living is one of the first hospices in Kenya, precisely set up by some members of the Catholic Church to care for elderly people in their terminal days, with great dignity. The place is spotless, beautiful, a wonderful reflection of quality health care.
That speaks to you then of the dignity of the human person. We take care of people in every moment of their life, very beautiful, very rich. We have an awful lot to give people.
We have a body and a soul (cf. Catechism, Point 362). You don’t hear too much about the soul nowadays. You don’t hear the soul mentioned in the newspaper, in a movie. We have to remind ourselves all the time that we have a soul.
Every human person has a soul, and that soul has that eternal destiny. It’s immortal, created to live forever. And that creates a great dignity to the human body.
All people have dignity, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Therefore, we respect everybody, we try to love everybody.
Even the beggar in the street, or the person who may have nothing, or homeless, or who might be dirty or unkempt, or a whole pile of things, or handicapped—that person has dignity.
And if they seem to lack a bit of dignity, we try to give them dignity. Create dignity for them. The whole of this man’s life was involved in creating more dignity for people.
And you see, because we have a soul, we have an intellect and a will: the two characteristics that distinguish the human person, intellect and will. We have a mind and we have a heart.
The animals don’t have a mind. Sometimes we’re told how close the man is to the monkey. We get that message said to us again and again and again, and it can seem very solid.
Sometimes you meet people who look a little bit like monkeys, and we might be developed from the monkeys, people say, but you see, man is way above the monkeys.
No monkey ever applied to get into Standard One in this school. No monkey ever made it to kindergarten. No monkey can add one and one, and know that it makes two. The human person is way above the monkeys.
If we keep on being told that we’re so close to the monkeys, it’s a bit insulting. We’re way above the monkeys. Monkeys are still living in trees. They haven’t progressed to be JKIAs or KICCs or Kianda Schools or Kibondenis or a whole pile of other things.
The monkeys are still way behind. Man is way above the monkeys. He has an intellect and he has a will. And that’s one of the reasons why we have to form our intellect with knowledge: to study, to learn, to make our intellect grow. All through our life we never stop learning.
Even this man of 95 yesterday was happy to learn new things. He was happy to have taught so many people so many things.
And we should try and focus our will on good things. The will is created for good. The intellect is created for truth (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, Question 82).
One of the great things that we’re able to do with our intellect is that we’re able to laugh. See, if somebody tells you a joke, you get the joke and you laugh. You might tell that joke to your boyfriend and he might not laugh. But that’s a different matter.
You go down the road and tell the joke to a donkey or to a monkey, they don’t laugh either. The dog doesn’t laugh. The animals don’t know how to laugh. But we know how to laugh. It’s a great sign that we’re human.
And we’re able to laugh at ourselves. We can look in the mirror and say, ‘Oh my goodness, what a silly billy you are. You’ve combed your hair in the wrong direction. You look so funny with that particular thing or whatever.’
We can laugh at ourselves. We have a capacity for self-reflection. A giraffe can’t look in the mirror and say, ‘Oh, I don’t look too good today.’ A giraffe has no capacity for self-reflection. But human persons can, because we have an intellect. With that comes wonderful things.
Thank you, Lord, for my intellect and for my will. Help me to develop them as much as possible so that I grow as a human person.
And the formation that we’re exposed to in this house very much has that aim, that we grow in human virtue. We learn how to do good things. We learn how to live. We learn how to talk.
We don’t just learn the subjects that we learn in school or in college, but we learn so many other things about how to develop our personality, our talents, our abilities; how to be a better person, how to live as a better person; how to communicate better to other people, and help them to lift themselves up also to increase their dignity.
It’s a great message. It’s a wonderful thing to transmit to people.
There was a lady once who was giving a talk about creation and she was talking also about Christian feminism. Christian feminism. Femininity from a Christian perspective.
Sometimes we hear an awful lot in the world today about radical feminism that rebels, that wants liberation from being a woman, liberation from my body, pro-choice, the right to choose everything. Usually, it’s all the bad things.
This lady was saying, Christian feminism, we look at creation, the whole story of creation, we find there’s an ascending order in creation.
God created the waters and then He created the stars and He created light and He created the swarms of living creatures and the cattle and the birds and then the high point of creation: God created man.
This is the greatest, highest point of creation. And then she said, “After that God created woman” (cf. Gen. 2:18,21-24). Not enough noise is made about that biblical point, that a woman is even the higher point of creation.
And after the lecture a man came to her and said, “You know, women were just created out of the side of a man.”
And she said, “That’s better than being created out of the slime of the earth.”
The highest point of creation, great Christian truth, it’s something we have to promote in all sorts of ways.
And in Scripture we’re told also about the greatness of the human soul: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36).
Wow! Our Lord tells us about the value of our soul. God weighed the weight of one soul against the weight of the whole material world. But the soul was more important because of the immortality of the soul. The soul will never die.
We might dream of having all sorts of things or buying all sorts of things or getting all sorts of things. But we need to be careful. None of those things have anything like the value of our soul. We have to take care of our soul.
That’s one of the reasons why we’re in this house, taking care of our soul.
And it may be that in the course of your life you will meet people who have profited the whole world, who have gained the whole world.
Maybe they got a wonderful job, they earned wonderful money, maybe they fulfilled all their dreams, they were able to go to the United States or some place, or the U.K., and they got this and they got that, and they come back and they build a nice house, and they build all sorts of wonderful things in this world. But they forget all about their soul.
There’s another story in the Gospel about the man who was doing so well. He was so prosperous, he was going to pull down his barn and build another barn and he was going to buy this and get that and do that. And God said to him, “You fool! This night you must give an account of your soul” (cf. Luke 12:16-21).
It’s not often that God calls people fools. But He called this guy a fool because he really was a fool.
You see it’s very easy for us to be fools, to be dreaming about the wonderful things of this world and to forget about the importance and the value of our soul.
This short passage of Genesis says so many important things about this world, about our life, about the order that has to be there, of how we are created as spiritual beings.
God is a spiritual being; that’s why we don’t see Him. Our soul is a spiritual reality, that’s why you don’t see it. But it’s there giving life to the body.
And we have to take care of all those things. It’s really worthwhile going and reading this first chapter of Genesis sometimes, slowly.
It’s very beautiful, very rich. And that’s why in these days in the Mass the Church places the story of creation before us. It happens a few times in the year.
We get the message. It doesn’t pass us by. God doesn’t impose these things on us. He offers them to us, reminds us about them occasionally.
He wants us to take the initiative, to really want to absorb those things, make them our own.
We can ask Our Lady, the Queen and Lady of all creation, that she might help us to get those essential truths very clear: about the greatness of man, the greatness of woman, the greatness of our role in the world, the importance of our soul, and the importance of taking care of that soul, helping it to reach its eternal destiny and to live forever.
I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
MVF