Everything is Awesome

This is a song from the popular LEGO movie. It is just in video stores now. It is a good movie. I blogged about it before. The song is played for a joke. The powers that be want to convince you that everything is awesome so they put out a catchy song and make everyone believe it. As another line from the movie says, "If it rhymes it must be true."

Yet is it true? In a real way it is. As Catholics we believe that God created the world. That all the beauty and wisdom of God is manifest in how he created it. So it is true to say that every created thing is awesome. 

He created every human person. He designed us all individually. He loves us. He made us in His image. He chose to die rather than live without us. So it is true to say every person is awesome. 

God is also acting in human history. No event is absent from His grace. He works good in bad circumstances. He works good in good circumstances. So it is true to say everything that happens is awesome.

Yet something else is true. Catholics would add another verse saying Everything is Fallen. We know it. We want to believe Everything is Awesome. We do. We know it should be true. Yet we know it is not. We believe it was and it will be again but right now we are in a fallen state.

That is very important to realize. For on thing, it means you cannot look at how things are to determine how they should be. If humans normally lie that does not mean they should be liars. We are fallen. We see the awesomeness of truth telling yet we fall short. 

We know that well enough about lying but we are forgetting it in other areas. Mostly we have forgotten it when it comes to sex. How people are is assumed to be how they should be. The awesomeness of one man and one woman in free, total, faithful and fruitful love is forgotten. So anything people can think of is declared to be good enough. 

The reality is there is still enough of that awesomeness around. Enough that it really isn't that plausible to think it is all an accident. That is really the only other choice. It is either all pregnant with potential awesomeness or it just is what it is. 

There really is not that much room for middle ground. You can say that truth-telling is obviously something we should strive for because it is embedded awesomeness. If you do, does it then make sense to say sex just is what it is and there is no awesomeness to strive for there? Lots of people go there but does it really make sense? Either something or Someone is injecting awesomeness into everything and everyone or not. If not then nobody and nothing is worth getting excited about.

Thomas Howard goes into this in his book Chance or Dance. He says either the whole world is a dance between us and God or the whole world is mere chance. We need to choose which to believe and embrace it fully. He sees most religion and even most secularism as playing it half way. Assuming there is a God some of the time and assuming there is not on other issues. It makes little sense. If we assume something was designed into the environment that obligates us to protect it then why would we not also assume something was designed into marriage that obligates us to protect it. We pick and choose based on what answer we want. Only Catholicism consistently sees God in history, in humanity, in nature and in Jesus. 

Atheism? One could imagine a consistent atheism. Really very few who call themselves atheists come close. I say that their credit. Some will argue that there is no  reason to prefer kindness over cruelty. Most won't go there.