Hypocrisy in Me? Purity of Intention –I
HYPOCRISY IN ME; Growing in Purity of Intention
Cenacle teaching 7/11/19
I. Father Cantalamessa’s 1st Lent Homily 2019 - “BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD”
https://zenit.org/articles/father-cantalamessas-1st-lent-homily-2019/
Þ According to Jesus, the essential condition for “seeing” God is purity of heart: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8).
Þ Two areas concerning purity:
- The righteousness of intentions
- Purity in morals
Þ The opposite of purity of intentions is hypocrisy, and the opposite of purity in morals is the abuse of sexuality.
- “When you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do. . . . When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. . . . And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites. “(Mt 6:1-18)
Þ It is surprising that the sin of hypocrisy—the sin most denounced by Jesus in the Gospels—enters so little into our ordinary formulations of examinations of conscience. Not having found in any of them the question, “Have I been a hypocrite?” I had to add it in there myself, and rarely have I been able to go past it to the next question without being convicted. The greatest act of hypocrisy would be to hide one’s own hypocrisy—hiding it from ourselves and others since it is impossible to hide it from God. Hypocrisy is, in large part, overcome the moment it is recognized.
Þ A person, wrote Blaise Pascal, has two lives: One is his true life, and the other is the imaginary one he lives in his own mind and the minds of other people. We work hard to embellish and conserve our imaginary being, and we neglect our true being. If we have some virtue or merit, we are careful to make it known somehow so as to attach it to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate a virtue from our true life and join it to the imaginary one: we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave, even to the point of giving up our life as long as people would talk about it.
- This is who he has become, but it is not who he is. I see him as who he is and suffer who he has become. 1/14/18
Þ Origin and the meaning of the word “hypocrisy.”
- It comes from the language of the theater.
- The exterior words and attitudes do not correspond to the inner reality of the heart. What appears on one’s face is not what is in one’s heart.
- The ancients gave it the meaning that it really has: pretense. What was negative in stage fiction was transferred to the word “hypocrisy.”
Þ The origin of the word puts us on track to discover the nature of hypocrisy. It turns life into a stage where we perform for the public; it means putting on a mask and ceasing to be a person in order to become a character. A fictive character is nothing but a corruption of an authentic person. A person has a face; a character wears a mask. A person is completely bare; a character is completely wrapped in clothes. A person loves authenticity and reality; a character lives a life of fiction and artifice. A person follows his or her own convictions; a character follows a script. A person is humble and gentle; a character is cumbersome and unwieldly.
- Ex. –a priest who had envy because all the brothers go to for counsel to his friend. …. TRANSPARENCY
Þ Hypocrisy sets traps for pious and religious people in particular. Why?
- Wherever spiritual values, piety, and virtues are most highly esteemed, the strongest temptation is to pretend to have them so as not to seem to be without them.
- “fake saint” – Simple Path p. 199
- Pope Francis warns us about the lie of being “fake saints”:
- God “generously forgives”…, but what he doesn’t forgive is “hypocrisy and fake saints,”… God prefers “sanctified sinners”—people who, despite their past sins, learn how to do a greater good. “Fake saints” are people who are more concerned with appearing saintly than doing good. …. We are all clever and always find a path that is not right, to seem more virtuous than we are: it is the path of hypocrisy. They pretend to convert, but their heart is a lie: they are liars! It is a lie … Their heart does not belong to the Lord; their heart belongs to the father of all lies, Satan. And this is fake holiness. Jesus preferred sinners a thousand times to these. Why? Because sinners told the truth about themselves. “Get away from me, Lord, I am a sinner!” Peter once said.
- Another danger comes from the multitude of rituals that pious people are supposed to perform and the rules they are supposed to observe. If these rituals are not accompanied by a continuous effort to establish them within one’s soul out of love for God and neighbor, they become empty shells.
Þ When hypocrisy becomes chronic, it creates, both in marriage in and in consecrated life, a “double life”: one that is public and well known while the other is hidden—often one during the day and another at night. It is the most dangerous spiritual state for a soul, and it becomes extremely difficult to exit from it unless something from outside intervenes and shatters the wall behind which a person is sealed off. It is the condition that Jesus describes with the image of whitewashed tombs:
- Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. (Mt 23:27-28)
Þ Ask: why hypocrisy is such an abomination to God?
Hypocrisy is a lie. It obscures the truth. In addition, hypocrisy deposes God and puts him in second place while putting creatures—the public—in the first place. “Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam 16:7): to cultivate outward appearance more than the heart automatically means giving more importance to human beings than to God.
- Simple Path Ch. 2 – Humility – 2-F p.64
- “we must be willing to pull out the entire root system of our sins, fears, and disordered tendencies to come to know who we are and live to please God. This is what the Path is meant to do. “(Simple Path p.70)
- 21. Allow Your Disorders to Come to the Light — p.71
- Trust, and with patient endurance, allow all your disorders to come to the Light. It is only in this way that you can be made pure in the furnace of God’s love. (8/6/13)
- Hypocrisy, then, is essentially a lack of faith. “How can you believe, who receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (Jn 5:44).
- Simple Path 4-B-1 The First Nail – Purification of our desires
- To expose our lies and begin to trust: “Only when we have discovered and rejected those lies and accepted the truth about ourselves can we trust ourselves and the Lord who wants us to come home.” P.189
II. From the teaching, The Eucharist, Part I, 6/22/2017:
Þ CCC -1366: [Christ], our Lord and God, was once and for all to offer himself to God the Father by his death on the altar of the cross,…
Þ Wherever our cross is, there is our altar of sacrifice. There is where our offering during the consecration of the Mass becomes real, our sacrifice as real flesh, the real pain of our suffering WITH Christ’s.
To come to the altar of sacrifice in the Mass without having lived my daily sacrifice in the altar of my cross, whether at home or work, is a sterile sacrifice to the Father. The words of the Mass —through Him, with Him, and in Him— must be lived daily in the ordinary, tediousness & difficulties of my life, in the sacrament of the moment. It is only in this way that my sacrifice is truly pleasing to God and made perfect in Jesus’ sacrifice of perfect love.
- Your lives will be a continuous prayer offering as you offer up your daily sacrifices and duties on the altar of your homes. Simple Path #98
Hypocrisy:
Do I live certain duplicity of life; one way with my family or those I live with and another way at work or outside in the world -- When in my home, I continue with a hardness of heart, and outside the home, I put on a different image (mask)?
(Continue from Fr Cantalamessa’s reflection:
- Hypocrisy is also a lack of charity toward one’s neighbor because it tends to reduce others to being admirers. It does not recognize the dignity that is properly theirs because it sees others only in connection to one’s own image. What is important is the size of the audience
- c) A Humble Person Lives to Please God Above All. Simple Path p.70. “the deep unconscious motive for being nice is fear…” p.71
