Christ Carrying the Cross – El Greco

Available on Amazon here and here. An online version can be found on archive.org.

Length of book: 142 pages

Though this book survives into our time relatively unknown, that peculiar phrase in its title is one that is still used quite often. The modern skeptic, who has the privilege of having been born after the Incarnation, will ask “What is the meaning of life?”. Yet in many cases, due to their blindness, they will, like the pre-Christian pagans, merely guess at the answer. Others will flat out deny there can be a meaning, despite their usage of the word “meaningless”, which like any word carries an objective definition and therefore a meaning, to describe what they perceive as the futility of existence. They may even laugh at the idea that there is an objective meaning to life – but this laughter is but a mere disguise for the misery that reigns in their heart of hearts.

A life of aimlessness is a life of sin, and to live in sin is to be its slave. One picks their poison, or perhaps their poison picks them: drunkenness, drug abuse, self-abuse, adultery, fornication, theft, etc. After all, “broad is the way that leadeth to destruction” (Mark 7:13), as Our Lord warned us. The enslavement, or yielding to sin, leads the sinner to despair, as Goodier writes:

He may declare that to resist is impossible; for the serpent, while it hisses, also fascinates. But to yield is a species of despair, and despair is its own condemnation, as well as its own tormentor. It is the nearest point to hell that man in this life can reach.

(23)

A great and terrible mystery is contained in these words. How many betray their reason for their appetite and find themselves in this pitiful state! “Cowards die many times before their deaths” (Julius Caesar, Act I. ii.), and so does the sinner die many times in spirit before his natural death, and he knows this, unless if by force of habit he has numbed himself so grievously that he does not realize his wretchedness. And if he does not repent, a second, far worse death awaits him, of which the state of sin is only a preview. Goodier poses these words to those objectors who see sin as liberty and belief in God as a restraint:

Accepting God, man must accept sin; true, but accepting God and sin, he also gives a nobler and a greater significance to all morality. Life is then no longer a mere course of law-girt duty, it is a course of heroic love. It is no longer the grudged service of a slave of nature; it is the willing service of a son.

(24)

How wise these words are! Without God, as can be seen more clearly in our age than in Goodier’s, morality – a word seemingly out of fashion today – inevitably becomes a series of arbitrary rules without any real consistency. For example, most people in the West would be horrified at the prospect of an adult brother and sister in an incestuous relationship, yet these same characters will uphold a “marriage” between two sodomites as a civil right. But if “love is love” (as the pro-sodomite activists will tell us), both these relationships should be socially acceptable. Note here how they have distorted the word “love”, how they forge it into a mere emotion, rather than what it truly is, which is an act of the will. Love, as Shakespeare writes, “bears it out to the edge of doom” (Sonnet 116. 12.), that is, perseveres through even the greatest trials. The sodomite version of love does not know this, because it rejects the value of sacrifice and therefore lacks authenticity. It is a glided pseudo-virtue that fools many.

Yet, despite being fooled, these worldlings will not take their belief in this nonsense to its logical conclusion. Perhaps this is because they have imbibed this moral system without knowing it. However, they must inevitably question themselves when they themselves are questioned by those who do not accept their beliefs. We see the common result in our times; an inability to reason and the resorting to name-calling and grandstanding, which reveals the reality that their worldview cannot be held up to scrutiny. It is only sustained by a shameful conformity, a “law-girt duty”. Thus we end up with this Phariseeism of our times, a labyrinth of hypocrisy that would perhaps stun even Caiaphas himself.

Accepting God and His Laws grants us the freedom to see and live in accordance with the truth. Only by loving Him can we love heroically. Illustrating the power of this heroic love in the life of St. Paul, Goodier writes:

St. Paul was no dreamer, yet he saw and understood that which for him turned life into death and life to death. For him this life was living death; death was the beginning of life.

(45)

But love is a driving force. “The love of Christ compels me,” he says once; and again another time: “Woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel.” Love drove him, love compelled him; the very prospect of what was yet to be, forced him to live this life all the more.

(49)

Our view of this life, in order for it to be well-ordered, must be understood in context of the next. By living life in God’s friendship through prayer and frequenting the Sacraments, we not only live, but live more abundantly. If we stay on the straight and narrow, we will become selfless and will be compelled by His love to live with hope in light of the everlasting glory that awaits us if we persevere to the end. We will overcome our worldliness with “other-worldliness” as Goodier terms it.

Our cornerstone is Jesus Christ, and all who reject Him shall fall on this stumbling-block, and will be ground to powder. And it is on this stone that the whole of society should be reorganized. We who have the Faith have a great challenge ahead of us in this regard, but not an impossible one. Amid all the evils today, it is easy to think about how we and our loved ones can be influenced by the darkness around us. We are right to acknowledge these dangers and fight against them, but we should not be choked up by our worries. It is important, as Goodier points out, to recognize the simple power of a good example:

If we are ourselves much more the product of our surroundings than we always realize, if others enter into our lives, and affect us for time and for eternity, much more deeply than they can imagine, no less true is it than we in our turn have our effect upon others. No man can so shut himself in as to be able to make his own world without consideration of his fellow-men. We owe as much as we receive.

(125)

The affect of an unspoken example is not a new thing. One realizes it when reading the lives of the saints, a great number of whom preached through their example alone.

Though certain forms of entertainment and conditions of modern life have made it more of a real possibility for a man to shut himself in, he can never truly shut out the thought of community and relationships with his fellow man. He still yearns for these things, because as God Himself has stated, “It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). Since the greatest commandment after the first is to love our neighbor as ourselves (cf. Matthew 22:37-40), true fulfillment comes by living in God’s friendship, and then by living in authentic friendship with other persons. In giving of ourselves unselfishly to our neighbor, especially to those of the household of the Faith, we shall receive.

As our life can only be understood in context of the next, we cannot truly understand Jesus without the context of the Blessed Mother. Devotion to her aims towards Christ, and takes nothing away from him. She, being the Refuge of Sinners, rather takes the souls devoted to her away from the world while they are still in the world, and brings them ever closer to her Son. Goodier wrote of this:

In the name of Jesus every knee shall bow; in the name of Mary every head shall be lifted up.

(138)

Through this excellent book, Goodier has left us a beautiful series reflections on the true meaning of life. Though they were written well over 80 years ago, they have many insights well worth considering in our day. May God grant eternal rest to his soul.

Most Rev. Alban Goodier