Everybody Bows

Humans naturally like to bow. It’s true. Everyone does it, whether physically, intellectually, spiritually, or what-have-you. We love to bow. To bow to something is to give yourself over to it. The person makes a self-gift to whatever object they are bowing to. We are hardwired to do it, and there’s no way out of it.

We all think we’re the exception, but none of us are. “Free thinkers” bow to Kant and the Enlightenment; drug addicts bow to drugs; our culture as a whole bows to sex/pornography; feminists bow to the ideology of gender equality; politicians, whether conservative or liberal, bow to ideologies in politics; post-modernity bows to freedom without boundaries, relativism, hedonism, and individualism. We all do it.

It makes sense that we universally bow to something. Giving ourselves over to something produces a rush in us, like it’s something we were meant to do. It’s going outside of our own little world and experiences a reality beyond ourselves.

There’s a problem though. Those things, people, deeds, ideas, ideologies, etc., that we bow to don’t give anything back. They tell us “bow lower, give yourself over to me even more, I promise I will make you happy,” but in reality, we end up bowing further and further until we are in the ground in our graves.

This is idolatry, and we all do it. We place something as our highest good that isn’t truly our highest good. Even though it may contain goodness in it, it is not the essence of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Sex is good, yes, but if we place it as our highest good we quickly descend into a disordered obsession with it. What results is the objectification of the human person, especially women, into sex objects for others’ satisfaction. It reduces our humanity. Freedom (and I’m on shaky ground here as an American, I know) is good, but it is not our highest good. When we place it as our highest good, we quickly descend into disorder where evil can become permissible simply because we cite freedom as our premise. Once again, people become dehumanized as a result of placing it as our highest good, especially the weakest and most vulnerable among us, like the unborn. Even service to the poor can be idolized. The Church gets criticized daily for being hypocritical for having so much expensive artwork and big beautiful cathedrals. We hear it said all the time, “the Vatican should sell all of its things in order to feed the poor.” But the Church does service to the poor as a good, it does not bow to it as the highest Good. More on that in a second.

Naturally you might say we should stop bowing and stand tall. “Bow to no one!” Except then we fall into the trap of bowing to the idea that we bow to no one.

There is, in the end, only one thing we can bow to rightly. Truth. And the Truth is a person. He is Jesus Christ, Son of the living God. He is the only one in existence who affirms our humanity when we bow to him, because he bowed down from heaven to become one of us first. We especially mark this when genuflect/bow to the Eucharist and during the creed at Mass when we say the words, “and by the Holy Spirit, was incarnate of the Virgin Mary.” He is the only one who will give back when we bow to him, because he is the only one who is alive and able to give back. The other things are deaf, dumb, mute, and dead. Lifeless. Christ is alive; he is the risen one from the dead. He calls us to the fullness of life, to the fullness of being human. When we bow to him, it is an incarnated reminder of salvation; it is death and resurrection. We die to ourselves the way Christ died on the Cross, that’s the bowing down part. Then he tells us to rise, to take part in the resurrection, the fullness of life in communion with God the Father in the Holy Spirit, so we stand back up straight and tall. That’s where we stand, that’s where we are free in the Truth, that’s where our lives are rightly ordered. That’s why the bowing Catholic is the most radically joyful, because the gift of him/herself to God is reciprocated, given back to them in far surpassing measure than the person gave.

Blessed Mother Teresa is one of the most profound examples of bowing to Christ and to nothing else, even her service to the poor. Her order of nuns is in some ways the antithesis to the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps says work, work, work, don't waste time on anything else. They stay for two years and then leave. Mother Teresa and her sisters would spend hours in adoration and attend daily Mass. When she received a large donation from a benefactor, she spent the money on a gold chalice for the celebration of Mass (The guy was initially upset, but converted to Catholicism and joined her order a year later). She ministered in one of the most dismal places on earth for the rest of her life and her nuns do the same. They bow to Christ, they die with him and they live in the fullness of the resurrection with him, and their service falls into order after that.

Verso l'alto!

Written by:
Marty Arlinghaus