A Homily for the Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 5:1-7 Philippians 4:6-9 Matthew 21:33-43

Every year in early October, the world plopped onto our porch. Today there is no need to wait. Access the web from whatever device you prefer, and there it is: a world full of dreams and desires!

All that came by post when I was a kid, though it could not possibly fit within our small mailbox. It was appropriately named the Sears Wish Book. Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penny produced similar volumes, but everyone needs a denomination, a place where you belong. We were Sears people.

Every day after school I thumbed through that book’s pages, folding the corners of many. By early December, I could have been employed by Sears, so well did I know their Christmas catalogue. 

There were the wishes that came true, like the “Fort Apache” and “Lost in Space” playsets, the snowman whose stomach could grind ordinary ice cubes into snow cones, and the most celebrated of all treasures: my Superman outfit. 

But reality never fully fleshes out our dreams, does it? It took lots of ice cubes and endless grinding to produce even a small snow cone. And not being old enough to read when I asked for the Superman outfit, I did not realize that the ability to fly came from Kal-El having been born under the heavier gravity of Krypton’s red sun. I thought the cape alone would do the trick. Thankfully, my parents declined my Christmas Eve pleas to lift me onto the roof of our home, and I passed what was left of the night repeatedly leaping off my bed. 

Of course, a good life, like the Sears Wish Book, grows more dreams than we can garner. I loved thinking of all the rocks that I could polish if I asked for the rock tumbler; I might have become another Tom Swift, boy inventor, if I had opted for the chemistry set; and I wondered what it would be like for my family to have a life-size, illuminated, outdoor Christmas scene. Of course, first we would need to live in a two-story brick home, like the folks in the Wish Book. 

Sears, Montgomery Ward and JCPenney have gone the way of all flesh, but wishes have not gone out of style. Today they are delivered digitally, which is why so many folk are bewitched by their screens. Wherever they might be found, however misguided our searches, we cannot stop seeking what our medieval forebears would have called “the transcendentals”: truth, goodness, beauty and unity.

These qualities were called transcendentals because they were thought to characterize anything that could possibly exist. Convinced that the world had come forth from a God who could be described as the fullness of each quality—truth, goodness, beauty and unity—our Christian ancestors thought that everything they might encounter in the world, however misused it might be, however twisted it might have become, still shared something of God’s own nature.

God stood above and beyond the world as its creator, the way a novelist transcends the pages of a book. But the book of being could not step out of the essence of what it meant to be God. The world might not always appear to be true, good, beautiful or one, but it is nonetheless always striving to become these things. 

Hence, for Christians, God cannot be reduced to some Zeus-like figure on a throne. That is no more than a souped-up spot within a world we can at least imagine. No, God must be, as St. Thomas Aquinas insisted, something we cannot truly imagine, though we know the necessary ingredients: God must be the fullness of truth, goodness, beauty and unity. We cannot define God, but we can at least analogically know God by considering these qualities. Only their fullness is worthy of the name God.

St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the first to speak of the transcendentals, what we might call the inner core of all wishes, linking Shakespeare through Walt Disney all the way to Joan Collins. But the foundation had been laid in ancient Greek philosophy. If this world was true and good, it must have come from something truer, better. And if we so often find the fractured and the fearful, some primordial fall must have occurred.

Hence St. Paul, when he wanted to root his little flock’s hearts in heaven, told the Philippians: 

Finally, brothers and sisters,
whatever is true, whatever is honorable,
whatever is just, whatever is pure,
whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious,
if there is any excellence
and if there is anything worthy of praise,
think about these things (Phil 4:8).

Paul lacks the precision of Thomas. He was a tent maker, not a philosopher. But both thinkers encourage us to look for God, to recognize ourselves as searching for God when we seek, to the best of our always limited ability, that which lies above, as St. Paul would say.

If you have been raised with Christ, 
seek what is above, 
where Christ is seated at the right hand of God (Col 3:1). 

A faith that can call itself Catholic, and truly be that, is always going to desire, pursue and nurture whatever it finds to be true, good, beautiful and one. This is why the Catholic Church has always been a patron of the arts, the sciences and learning in general, even if at times individuals thwart or truncate that pursuit.

The Second Vatican Council opened “Gaudium et Spes,” its pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world, with these words:

The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community composed of men. United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for every man. That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with mankind and its history by the deepest of bonds (No. 1).

How naïve I was to think that a world of wishes could fit into a book that came in the post! How naïve we all are when we think that even a worldwide web is large enough to contain our hearts, our desires for what is good, true, beautiful and one. 

All we really know is that the heart cannot help but search for these things. We are the one spot in creation that seeks and finds traces of the transcendentals in the world that surrounds us. 

Why were we created by God to wish? Could we have possibly evolved into those who wish without God? But how can something greater emerge from what is less? Must not that which is less have always been ordered toward that which is more? Can evolution be mindless when it produces creatures who keep on wishing despite endless disappointment? If evolution is all there is, why has it failed to weed out wishes? 

The next time you find yourself alone in your disappointment, remember that wishes transcend us. They call to us. We do not always wish rightly. We regret some of our wishes. They were not quite as true, good, beautiful or one as we thought. But none of us can stop wishing.

To wish is to want God.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.