Divinity and the Human Soul

 September 1, 2026

Aleteia

Hello! How is each and every one? Wow!  Help my excited patience, Lord.  I am so excited to move on with the book, Give It One More Year, Sir, that is, to reach as many persons to get hold of a copy at least.  Help me pray that it be so.  However, I am challenged to take into consideration other aspects. At God’s pace the book will move and accordingly will I also move. Help me with your prayers, please. 

We are now in the first day of the –ber months.  On the 8^th we will be celebrating with the Church the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Soon Christmas cheer will echo everywhere. The soundtrack of the season is about to begin.  Who brings about the Christmas cheer?  Jesus is coming in three months.  The season announces this great news.  Jesus is coming into the world.  His mother, our Mother Mary is “infanticipating” as we are in profound anticipation of the Nativity.  Nine months ago March 25, the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to bring her the message that she will be the mother of the Son of God by the Holy Spirit.  She is nearing her 6^th month pregnancy and on Christmas Day, December 25, will give birth to the child Jesus.  Hence let us keep this in mind so that every time we hear Christmas carols, we can say Come, Jesus, Come!  We can look forward to preparing ourselves spiritually beginning with the Sacrament of Reconciliation as well as physically and materially. 

Following now is the continuation of the fourth word of Christ from the Cross  (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).

3 God and the Soul

The first three words on the Cross have reference to physical suffering: this fourth word has reference to moral suffering or sin. Physical suffering is pain; moral suffering is evil or sin.

Our world takes sin very lightly, regarding it too often as a relic of ages that were ignorant of evolution and psychoanalysis. It is the contrary that is true: the more we know about death and its causes, the more we know about sin, for in the language of Sacred Scripture, “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).

Death and sin are identified and rightly so: death in the physical order corresponds to evil in the moral order. Death in the physical order is normally the domination of a lower order over a higher order.

For example, animals and men generally die through the slow oxidation and burning out of the organism. At that moment, when the oxidation of chemical order dominates the biological order, the phenomenon called death ensues. 

Now, man has not only a body but also a soul. At that precise point, then, when the lower law of self dominates the higher law of charity, when the flesh dominates the spirit, when the love of earth gains supremacy over the love of God, there is the subversion of due order, and that domination of the lower over the higher order we call sin. 

What death is to the body that sin is to the soul; namely, the surrender of life human in one case, divine in the other. That is why St. Paul calls sin a crucifixion or the killing of the divine life within us: “Crucifying again to themselves the Son of God and making him a mockery” (Heb. 6:6). 

Since sin is the taking of divine life, it follows that nowhere else was sin better revealed than on Calvary, for there, sinful humanity crucified the Son of God in the flesh. Here sin comes to a burning focus. It manifests itself in its essence: the taking of Divine Life.

Moral evil reaches its greatest power in the taking of the life of the Man of Sorrows, for a world capable of killing the God-Man is capable of doing anything. Nothing else it can ever do will be worse, and all that it will ever do will be but the reenactment of this tragedy. There, where character was perfect, and suffering most undeserved, the victory of evil was most complete.

If sin could have found a reason for being hateful toward God, the crime would have been less heinous. But His enemies could find no fault in Him except His all-compassing goodness. 

But goodness is the one thing sin cannot endure, for goodness is sin’s constant reproach. The wicked always hate the good. The very unreasonableness of the judgment against Our Lord — for even Pilate admitted he found the Man innocent — was the mirror of the anarchy of sin.

Sin chose the battleground, set up the gallows of torture, influenced the judges, inflamed the crowds, and decided on the death of Divine Life. 

It could have chosen no better way of revealing its nature. It refused to have God on earth, and so it lifted His Cross above the earth.

Sin wanted no shepherding calls to repentance, and so it fastened Him to a tree. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). They abandoned Him at birth; they would now abandon Him in death. Thus would sin reach its most perfect expression: for sin is the abandonment of God by man.

But the Savior is on the Cross not to go down to defeat but to redeem from sin. How better can He atone for sin than by taking upon Himself one of its most bitter consequences?

Since sin is the abandonment of God by man, He now wills to feel its consequence: the abandonment of man by God. Such is the meaning of the fourth word uttered in the moment when darkness crept over Calvary like a leprosy: “My God, my God, why hast thou abandoned me?”

Man rejected God. Our Lord willed to feel that rejection within Himself. Man turned away from God; He, who is God united hypostatically with a human nature, now wills to feel that awful wrench, as if He Himself were guilty. It was all deliberate. He was laying His life down of Himself, even when they thought they were taking it away.

He willed to be identified with man, and now He resolves to travel the road to the end and to take upon Himself the terrible loneliness of sin. His pain of abandonment expressed in this fourth word was double: the abandonment by man and God. 

Man abandons Him because He refuses to deny His divinity; God seemingly abandons Him because He wills to forgo divine consolation, to taste the bitter dregs of sin that the cup of sin may be emptied.

As a symbol of that double abandonment by heaven and earth, His Cross is suspended between both, and yet uniting them for the first time since Adam abandoned God.

None of us knows the deeper meaning of the cry; no one can know. He alone who is sinless can know the utter horror of sin that caused it. 

But this we do know: that at this moment He permitted Himself to feel the solitariness and abandonment caused by sin. And yet His cry proves that though men do abandon Him, they never completely desert Him, for a man can no more shake off God than he can deny parentage.

That is why His cry of abandonment was prefaced with the cry of belief: “My God, my God!” Into it was concentrated the loneliness of every sinful heart that ever lived. 

And yet with it all was the divine nostalgia — the loneliness of the atheist who says there is no God and yet under starry skies believes in His power.

So, too, the loneliness of fallen-away Catholics who have left the Church not for reasons but for things, and who, like prodigal children, still dream of the happiness of the servants in the Father’s house.

So, too, the loneliness of the enemies of religion, who testify to its reality by the bitterness of their hate, for no man hates a mirage.

So, too, the loneliness of the pessimists who complain against the evil in the world, but only because they believe more deeply still in the reality of justice. 

So, too, the loneliness of sinners who hate themselves for hating virtue.

So, too, the loneliness of the worldly who live without religion, not because they deny it, but because they are “sore a dread lest, having Him, [they] should have naught beside” (Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven, lines 20-21).  All in their own way are saying: “I abandon and yet I believe.”

It is just that which makes one wonder if there is really any sinner who has ever gone so far down its dark, damp corridors as to forget that he left the light. The words on the Cross seem to say so much.

Not even those direct descendants of the executioners who pillage churches and crucify Christ’s ambassadors have yet proved it, for how can one hate so intensely that which he believes to be only a dream? 

If religion is the opium of the people, why, instead of putting men to sleep, does it awaken them to martyrdom? There is no explanation; only the Infinite can be infinitely hated and infinitely loved. 

That is why sinners crucified Our Lord, and why the Crucifixion made saints. Our Lord is the infinite God.

It is hard for us to grasp the awfulness of sin, but if we cannot see it in its relation to the death of the all-holy One of God, then we are beyond repentance. 

The truth is that, as long as sin endures, the Crucifixion endures. Clovis, the King of the Franks, on hearing for the first time the story of the Crucifixion said: “If I had been there with my army, this never would have happened.” But the fact is, Clovis was there. So was his army. So were we.

The Crucifixion atoned not only for the sins of the past but also for the sins of the future.

I saw the Son of God go by

 Crowned with a crown of thorns.

“Was it not finished, Lord,” said I.

“And all the anguish borne?”

He turned on me His awful eyes,

“Hast thou not understood?

Lo, every soul is a Calvary

And every sin a rood!” (Rachel A. Taylor, “The Question”).

Because our body seems closer to us than our soul, we are apt to think of pain as being a greater evil than sin. But such is not the case: “Fear ye not them that kill the body . . . but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). 

Thus, the reality of sin in the Crucifixion and the idea of hell became related. The Cross proves that life is fraught with tremendous issues; that sin is so terrible that full payment in justice could be made only by the death of God made man. 

If sin cost the death of Divine Life, then the refusal to accept redemption can mean nothing less than eternal death, or hell. 

Life, then, is not a mere experience; it is a drama that involves issues of eternal life and eternal death. Those who would rob justice of hell would rob Christ of His Cross. 

Were we but animals, our choices would pass away with their fulfillment, but just as our thoughts are fastened to truth, which is unchangeable, so, too, our resolves are registered on the scroll of perfect goodness, which is eternal.

If in our business we take from our cash registers the slip on which is recorded the debits and credits of the day, shall we be so unreasonable as to believe that we, who live by such an order, should ourselves be governed any differently?

Why, then, at the end of our day’s work on earth, should not the Divine Bookkeeper find registered on our consciences our answer to the question of whether our life has been a failure or a success? Either we lose our soul or we find it; either we live or we die. 

And if such a fate does not come at the end of our story, then the Cross is a mockery and life is vain. But seeing how high we can rise, and how low we can fall, we can see the importance of our choices — the danger of being careless and the thrill of being brave.

As one writer has put it:

They are cowards who educate us to think that we are meant to stop at home in swaddling clothes, protected from fresh air and all possible dangers. They would make us soft and effeminate and unfit for the hurly-burly of life. This is no man’s life but a tame travesty of it. All that is best in us revolts against coddling and the denial of all risk and adventure.

What we need is some summons to the semi-divine courage which is latent in all of us, some challenge to risk all that we have for love. Imagine a man born of woman, ambling along on some old nag or wrapped up in some limousine to conquer the earth and to conquer himself and to make himself fit for the Divine Eros. I am tired of this cheapening of stupendous issues; I demand that hell be given back to the world (M. C. D’Arcy, S.J., The Pain of This World).

And if it be not given back to the world, then men will say, no matter how foul we become, all will be well with us in the end.

But as long as hell remains, we have a standard by which evil can be judged, by which those who trample the love of man and God underfoot can be measured, by which those who attempt to drive God from the earth He made can be weighed. 

If a man wants to know his worth, let him take one look at the Man on the Cross. There Love stands Crucified! If he crucified Love, then he is without Love; and to be without Love is hell!

If he crucifies his lower self to be Christlike, then he is in love, and to be in love with Love is heaven. 

Dear Savior, open our eyes to see that our forgetfulness of the horror of sin is the beginning of our ruin. Too prone are we to blame finances, economics, and balances of trade for our ills, our woes; too unmindful are we that these are but the symptoms of our rebellion against Thy divine law.

Because we have rebelled against Thee, our Creator, creatures have turned against one another, and the world becomes one vast charnel house of hate and envy.

Give us light to see, O Lord, that it was sin which hardened itself into Thy nails, wove itself into Thy thorns, and congealed itself into Thy Cross. 

But let us also see that if Thou didst take the Cross for us, then we must be worth saving; for if the Cross is the measure of our sin, then the crucifix is the pledge of our redemption, through the same Christ Our Lord. Amen. — The Rainbow of Sorrow

Wow!  Let this post challenge you and myself to console Christ and assure Him from now onwards with His help there will be lesser number of sinners nailing Him on the Cross.  Our resolve and effort will multiply the number of saints and diminish the number of sinners.  You and I cannot do this without calling on Christ every minute of the day.  And as often as you and I realize we have weakened and fallen, asap you and I will begin again going against the grain of our personal weaknesses and loving Christ more and more.  We will be more inclined to listen to His voice and do whatever he commands.  Today’s responsorial psalm in the Mass is “Lord I love your commands”.  Remember the Lord commands when He wills but He also gives what He commands, meaning, he grants us the grace to do what He commands.  Hence He is truly good and merciful. Then you and I will be able to sing “I will sing forever of your love O Lord; I will celebrate the wonders of your name.”

See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”

Affectionately,                    

Guadalupinky