Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In this morning’s reading for the lenten Sunday of the Holy Cross, beloved in the Lord, Jesus asks the question, the anthropological question, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? And what can a man give in exchange for his soul?”

I have in mind this morning to share with you three reflections on faith and the soul. Faith and the soul. First, I’ve been reflecting lately, in the mornings, while my wife and I are sitting there having our first coffee; I’ve been reflecting that faith is a natural act. Now, that needs explanation. I don’t mean by this that faith in God is natural in the same sense that breath and the senses are natural. When I say “natural” in this context, I mean that faith corresponds to the deepest level of the structure of the human soul. It corresponds to the deepest structure of the soul.

Let’s consider an illustration. Let’s review at least my notes from high school physics. These are the things we studied when I studied high school physics. That was a very long time ago. Remember, there were only seven elements in the periodic table when I went through high school. [Laughter] Human beings observed the phenomenon of magnetic attraction thousands of years ago. “Magnetic” comes from the same root as the city of Magnesium, by the way, which is one of the first places it was documents. Human beings recognized that certain rocks possessed a magnetic quality, particularly the chemical called magnetite, or lodestone.

Only about 2,000 years ago, however, the Chinese discovered the disposition of a magnet to align itself in a north-south direction. That has been known about pretty much the same time as the Gospel. It is apparently to those Chinese scientists that we owe the invention of the magnetic compass, which originally was simply a lodestone hung from some sort of contraption, and it lined up with the earth. And we would do that; they noticed that.

The magnetic compass first found its way to Europe during the twelfth century, at exactly the same time as the first flourishing of the medieval universities. Obviously, this device proved an important aid to all forms of navigation, but especially on the sea, where normally you have fewer landmarks to guide you. By the 16th century, the 1500s, scientists calculated the earth’s magnetic attraction at various places, so that compass directions could be corrected for greater accuracy, because they did notice that pretty early, that it wasn’t always the same direction. It was kind of north.

In the year 1600, just three years before his death, William Gilbert, a physicist and astronomer at Cambridge, published his treatise, De Magnete, in which he concluded that the earth itself behaved as a giant magnet. Now, the relationship between magnetism and electricity was still being explored. When I went to high school, they told us to use our left hands like this, the thumb pointing in the direction of the current, the other four fingers pointing in the direction of the magnetic field. Did you learn that in high school? Yes, a number of you are shaking your head; you did learn it that way. Okay. How many elements were there?

Man: In my time?

Fr. Pat: Yeah.

Man: Sixteen.

Fr. Pat: Sixteen. [Laughter] Now, that was in 1600. During the intervening centuries, chemists and geologists struggled to explain why the earth acts as a great magnet. More than 400 years of study were required to produce a convincing theory of how the magnetic field is produced. A theory. One thing about the geologists, I’ve noticed, that unlike the atmospheric scientists, they are much more cautious about their conclusions, much more tentative. It was only recently, in the 1940s, during my childhood, that Walter Elasser in Germany and Edward Bullard in England suggested that motion in a liquid core of the earth might account for a self-sustaining magnetic field.

By this time, seismology and other studies had given a clearer picture of the earth as having a solid inner core; then a liquid outer core, with chiefly metal composition, mostly iron; and then a mantle of rock—all of this below the thin crust of the earth that we can actually observe. This is still all theory! We’ve never looked at any of this.

Energy from radioactivity travels outwards as heat-producing thermal convection is found in the earth’s core. And this is shifting all the time. That’s what accounts—that’s what can account for the phenomenon of the magnetic structure of the earth.

Although our knowledge of the core of the earth and its dynamics is sketchy and uncertain to this day, it seems that the movement of this liquid is the cause of the earth’s magnetic field—it seems. They’re not reaching hard and fast conclusions, because it’s complex. It’s nowhere near as complex as the physics of the atmosphere, about which people are being very dogmatic. This science is necessarily modest in its claims.

What is certain, however, is the general reliability of the magnetic compass. No one doubts the navigational use of the compass, whatever the theory that might explain the matter.

Now, why have I reviewed this short history of magnetism? What does this have to do with anything? I believe it is a symbol, stronger than a metaphor—a symbol of something far more serious than the subject of the earth’s magnetic core. With all the best minds in history, and especially with the Bible, I am convinced that the human soul is possessed of a magnetic attraction rooted in the depths of its own structure. We know very little about this, but it’s very interesting that some of the earliest treatises in Christian literature are on the structure of the human soul. I’m further convinced that faith alone—faith in the God who created the soul—is the only reliable compass to interpret that attraction and give the soul navigational direction.

You see, we do not need faith in God to get through life. Lots of people, they made that decision. Many people live completely without such faith. They get through life pretty much the way a monkey get through life. The monkey has no sense that he’s on a journey. Why? Because the monkey’s not on a journey! The monkey’s not going anywhere. He’s certainly not evolving into human beings. I’ve noticed this about monkeys, although I have slight familiarity with them. I’ve observed them in zoos, from a distance, but I have the impression that they do not know how to read a compass. The monkey just moves around from tree to tree, from one thing to another, and at the end, he dies.

Now, those who believe that human beings are derived from monkeys, they believe that’s what human beings are supposed to do. And there are human beings who live exactly that way. They move around, they do things, they may actually have a good time, as monkeys seem to have a good time.

But why do I call such folk to repentance? Because of the conviction that human beings are not monkeys. They have never been monkeys! There’s absolutely no biological connection and continuity between a monkey and a human being! Moreover, the human soul has an in-built attraction to a metaphysical lodestone. Human beings have a natural disposition to believe in God.

Faith, then, is something congruent with the deepest structure of human experience. To lose one’s faith is to lose one’s compass in life. If faith is natural, however, this means that unbelief is unnatural; that without God the human being has no compass. He moves through life with no adequate idea about direction. And Jesus asked that question: What profit is there in it—what profit, what value—to gain everything and to forfeit one’s soul?

Point two, faith is intentional. It’s a matter of decision—not right away, not right away, but eventually. It’s a matter of decision. I think most of us, looking back over our lives, we can point to those times when an implicit faith became quite explicit and very intentional. I say I’m presuming we can do that, because you’re all here. Those that didn’t do that, they’re not here. Faith must be chosen. Faith is an act of the soul. It has everything to do with the deliberate orientation of the heart.

Faith is exercised through the very faculties of the soul, through the intellect, the will, imagination, the memory. All of these things we normally call psychological faculties. Faith does not, therefore, remain external to the one who has it. Faith is something that lives inside us. Thus, St. Paul says that circumcision is a matter of the heart. Physical circumcision changes the body; faith changes the soul. God’s grace justifies by transforming us from within. It actually produces something new inside. It is inside the soul that human beings consult the inner compass of faith.

A necessary step, I believe, in the contemporary proclamation of the Gospel, is first of all to convince human beings that they have souls, since the great bulk of the higher educational enterprise is dedicated to proving to them that they don’t.

Third, faith is not guesswork. Faith is not built on probabilities. Faith is more compelling than any other form of knowledge. Now if we consider certainty, certitude, not from the perspective of intellectual clarity but from the viewpoint of action, hardly any truth logically to perceive can measure up to the certainty of faith. Mathematical certainty pales beside the certitude of faith. Scientific and logical certitude amounts to nothing beside the certitude of faith.

Although Albert Camus speculated that the day may dawn that, if a man insisted the addition of two and two equals four, he would be shot for it, I rather doubt that most men, faced with that choice, would go on insisting that two and two do make four. I’m wondering… I love you too much to ask for a show of hands. I’m wondering how many mathematicians—especially mathematicians!—because I’ve studied enough math to know you can wiggle out of that one. Simply put, mathematical truth is not the sort of truth that evokes loyalty. Most men, I fear, would deny a mathematical truth rather than be short for affirming it. Therefore, how certain is it?

It is not as though mathematical and logical truths are not truths of action. We do act on them all the time. Men act on the truths of mathematics and logic as well as conclusions of science, attained through experiment and empirical evidence. Still, these truths do not evoke from the soul that sense of loyalty elicited by the truths of faith. This loyalty is not separable from certainty. The martyrs do not die in a state of doubt. Now, a truth for which men will die is more certainly know than a truth for which men are not willing to die, even though the former is subject to doubt and the latter might not be. The certainty for which a man may live, suffer, and die is of a very different order from the certainty available to logic, mathematics, or science.

Faith is closer to what we call personal trust, as when we are sure—as when we say we are sure of somebody. Here I believe all of you know what I’m talking about. It’s a different kind of certainty, isn’t it? But it’s more than that. It’s a certainty shaped by the context of love and the union that love brings about. Those who lose their faith lose it because they were not in love with the object of faith. You can take that one, put that at the top of your paper, that those who lose the faith had already lost the love. The persons who will choose the mathematics, logic, and science are able to stand on their own: strong and clear, independent of my sin, indifferent to my notice, imperious in their claims, relentless in their assertions, and in no way dependent on my adherence to them.

The truths of faith, on the other hand, are what we may call invitational, more humble in their approach to the mind, gentler and more compassionate to our fears, more clearly interested in our hopes, holding out greater blessings for us to anticipate, and exclusively promising a rich recompense for our fidelity. All of these are contained in the questions Jesus asked today: What will a man give in exchange for his soul? And then he inserts the key into the lock: Whoever desires to come after me—me—whoever desires to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow—me. Amen.