Imaging the following: a guest lecturer visits your parish to address the topic, “values for the third millennium.” He steps to the podium and immediately begins to describe the next one thousand years in such fantastic terms that human values as we have known them will be obsolete. We will need new values, so he says, for the beings who inhabit the century of cyberspace and space travel.
How would you react? Would you feel inadequate? Would you feel small in comparison to the future? Would you think you need the experts, like this lecturer, to tell you what those values will be?
I’ll tell you what I would do: I would laugh. I would laugh at his presumption and nonsense. And to those who did not laugh I would say, “Beware of anyone who comes forth to declare new values for the new millennium. Beware of anyone who implies the passage of a thousand years requires the reinvention of the moral wheel.”
True values remain the same, because the nature and destiny of man remain the same. They await rediscovery, recovery, and re-appropriation by succeeding generations. Even those generations who will inhabit cyberspace or search for life on Mars and beyond will need those values.
Some have complained that traditional values didn’t bring utopia, didn’t put an end to prejudice and hatred, didn’t return us to Eden. But then, nothing can restore the perfection we lost so long ago upon the earth.
What we need for the next millennium, as Father has written in his pastoral letter, “On the Coming of the Third Millennium,” is growth in the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and love—those virtues conferred by Christ through the sacraments of his Church.
John Paul II says the “crisis of civilization” must be met with the message of the “civilization of love.” The civilization of love, he says, is “founded on the universal values of peace, solidarity, justice, and liberty, which find their full attainment in Christ.”
Unfortunately, the term “value” is misunderstood. Value is a great wiggle word—you can utter it knowing everyone in the audience will hear what they want to hear. People with diametrically opposed views can agree with what they hear being said.
Traditionalists will hear a deep concern about old-fashioned virtues, tradition, and the natural law. Progressives will hear an allegiance to individual autonomy, freedom of choice, the social construction of reality.
Our present age can distinguish right from wrong much more easily than it can explain it. Why have we become so inarticulate? Moral arguments require a firm grip on first principles, an understanding of the foundations of morality. We don’t think that morality has any “out there” upon which to reflect. We have come to assume that morality is cooked up in the murky, subjective recesses of the individual and collective heart.
In the natural order, reason gazes on the reality of human nature as seen through the history of its institutions and cultures. In the revealed order, the virtue of faith, itself a disposition of the intellect, comprehends the teaching of the biblical commandments and virtues.
Moral values, whether natural or revealed, can be apprehended by the intellect, because values are nothing less than the formal properties of natural law and biblical principles. In other words, if we say work is a value, we should be able to trace that back to our understanding of how human nature flourishes, or how the image of God becomes fully actualized, through work.
There is a millennium project to be undertaken. If we do what our Holy Father asks, if for the year 2000 we “gather with renewed fidelity and ever deeper communion along the banks of this great river; the river of Revelation, of Christianity and of the Church,” then our culture will once again be strengthened by the light of faith.
Faith will once again illumine reason. Reason itself will be restored to nature; the ground of true moral values will reappear. The true meaning of those rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will reemerge like a lost child stumbling out of the woods and into his backyard.
We will wonder how we lost our way, how we got so far from our familiar home. Was it the novelty? The need to be on our own? The attraction of the darkness? Or were we simply bored? Did we become indifferent?
Whatever the reason, let us take the opportunity of the coming millennium and put to death the culture of death. What must be new in this struggle will not be the values, but rather we who bear those values. We must be born anew, spiritually, in the Body of our Lord, our God who “makes all things possible.”