Christmas 2014.
I found another potent quotable that fits the day perfectly, at least I think it does. After all Christmas is a Christian holiday, sacred day. The passage I came across is in an article in First Things, a Catholic journal, entitled "Strangers in a Strange Land" by Charles J. Chaput, archbishop of Philadelphia. Responding to his discovery that in Canada "In just fifty years since Quebec's 'Quiet Revolution' of the 1960s, an entire Catholic culture has collapsed," the archbishop clearly states his theme: "In the developed world, more and more people of faith, people for whom God is the anchor of their lives, people who once felt rooted in their communities, now feel like strangers, out of place in the land of their birth."
The first thing he does is clearly define "the purpose of our lives" as "the privilege of knowing, loving, and being loved by God; of serving his people and being his witnesses. That's the real story of the world, the narrative we belong to. Only God is God, and God is good. And God's goodness invites us to remember three things.
One: We're a people of worship first, and action second. That doesn't excuse retreating from the world, nor is it an alibi for quietism. But for Catholics, there's no real Christian political action, no genuinely Christian social service, unless it flows out of the adoration of God. [wow!] Romano Guardini said that adoration is humanity's instrument of truth. It's the safeguard of our mental health and integrity. Adoration breeds humility, and humility is the beginning of sanity. Adoration grounds our whole being in the real reality: the fact that God is God, and man is his creation.
Two: There are no unhappy saints. Pope Francis says, 'A Christian without joy is not a Christian.' Joy is the mark of a person who has truly found God. Chesterton [one of my heroes] wrote that joy is the 'gigantic secret' of the believer. He said, 'Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.'
Three: We're in the world but not of the world. We forget that at our peril. Henri de Lubac wrote many years ago that when the world worms its way into the life of the Church, the Church becomes not just a caricature of the world, but even worse than the world in her mediocrity and ugliness." (January 2015, pg. 26)
Fundamental human things: adoration, joy, and in the world but not of the world, like Christ.
Christmas 2014