Fr. Leonard Klein on Sanctity of Life
Our little girl, however, has made a life-defining decision by herself. I couldn't be more proud of her. But I cannot deny that what she said to my wife and I stopped us briefly in our slightly smug, religiously disinterested, bleeding-heart liberal tracks.
What courage had it taken for her to tell us what she wanted? It was clear that our brave, sweet daughter had thought about her faith long and hard. Looking back, we realised we had regularly discussed our differing beliefs. Our daughter brought us Genesis. We gave her the . . . Big Bang. She brought us the Nativity and peace and goodwill at Christmas. We gave her family, friends and good food. She brought us the crucifixion. We gave her the Easter Bunny. She brought us heaven, god and an afterlife. We gave her 21st-century life and a brief future as worm fodder.
The
little girl’s conversion didn’t come from nowhere. Her parents were living in France and had
enrolled her in a French Catholic school because of its good academic reputation. There she had regular biblical and
catechetical instruction. But the story
is still a reminder of the power of the Gospel, of the simple story of Jesus.
An
eight year old girl could see that there had to be more to than the comforts of
21st-century life and a brief
future as worm fodder.
The
Light shines in the darkness, as we are reminded again and again at this time
of year. Christ has come to be the light
of the nations and that light will shine.
Sometimes the light is needed to make it clear that there is great
darkness.
Winter
Ordinary Time is still very much the season after Epiphany, even though we no
longer call these “Sundays after Epiphany.”
The Gospels focus on crucial episodes from Christ’s early ministry, ones
that reveal him, manifest him. They are
little epiphanies.
In the
English masses we see John the Baptist pointing out Jesus Christ. Today’s Gospel in the Latin Mass is the story
of Christ’s first miracle, the changing of water into wine at the marriage in
Cana of Galilee. But John uses the term
“sign.” This episode, which is one of
the key parts of the liturgical observance of Epiphany, is a sign, a revelation
of Jesus as Son of God and Savior.
God can make himself known – this is a simple, basic assumption of the
Christian faith. There is revelation;
God makes himself known to us.
We are
not condemned merely to figure out on our own who God is and what he
intends. We do not stumble about in
darkness.
We can
of course by the right use of our reason know that God exists and perceive some
of the truth about him. This is a firm
Catholic teaching. Reason, rightly used,
can perceive God in the mystery of being, in the fact that there is something
rather than nothing, in the wonder that we exist. Reason can perceive the reality of God in
beauty and in truth and in our thirst for truth. It is capable of perceiving the difference
between good and evil.
But we
are not just fumbling in the darkness toward God. He has come to us. He gives us a signs. And John the Baptist points to the ultimate
sign, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
There he is; look at him; see him;
watch him – this is what John says to us. Here is “The Lamb of God, who takes away the
sin of the world.” There is sin and it
needs taking away, and in the work of Jesus the world finds its hope, its
future and its joy.
Karl
Barth, the greatest Protestant theologian of the last century, repeatedly
referred to an altarpiece painted in the early 1500’s by Matthias
Grunewald. In it John the Baptist stands
pointing to the crucified Jesus ,“the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of
the world.”
His
point was that John the Baptist is always the model for the Church and for each
of us. Our lives and our conversation
are to point to Jesus Christ.
There
is in our culture great pressure to privatize religion, to make it just a
matter of personal feelings. There is
pressure on us to pull our arms in and not point to Christ, lest anyone’s
opinions be offended and we breach the sacred walls of political
correctness. There is great pressure to
keep religion inside ourselves or at least inside the church walls. But we cannot do so.
Christ’s
Epiphany is a public event and makes a universal claim on the world: He comes
to take away the sins of the world and must be proclaimed to a
world that desperately needs him.
For we
see a world choking on the results of its own sin because of its failure to
perceive where its true good lies.
We
need to point that out some of the time, to point to the darkness so that the
need for the Lamb of God might be comprehended.
Sometimes we in the Church are the only ones who dare to see and
describe the truth.
This
is the Sunday before the anniversary of the scientifically, logically and legally
disastrous Roe v. Wade decision that
struck down the abortion laws of all fifty states and has led to over fifty
million legally sanctioned killings in the United States. Then and now we are told that unlimited
contraception and abortion were going to help fix poverty, stabilize the
family, put an end to child abuse because now every child would be a wanted
child, and hold down the rate of out of wedlock births. None of this has happened. Instead the rate of out of wedlock births has
sextupled since then, and the poverty rate stands pretty much where it was when
Lyndon Johnson announced the war on poverty fifty years ago. The breakdown of the family is now the
primary driver of poverty. But few dare
to connect the dots.
We must
shine the light on such stubborn truths, but that’s only the prelude to our
real mission, which is to point to Jesus Christ, as John the Baptist did, to
bring the light of Christ to bear on human catastrophe and longing.
That’s
what somebody did for that little English girl.
As her father wrote: she brought
us heaven, god and an afterlife. We gave her 21st-century life and a brief
future as worm fodder.
We do
not long to be worm fodder and the material comforts of our era are
insufficient. God places into the human
heart the desire for much more than that.
There is little question that the world longs for more than that – so
much of its folly comes from the effort to find more.
But
somebody stretched out an arm and showed her the Lamb of God, who takes away
the sins of the world, and she saw and believed.
Perhaps,
then, the sin that we most need to confess, that needs most to be taken away
from us, is our laziness and lukewarmness about the Gospel, for that is
laziness and lukewarmness toward the need of our neighbors.
When
we face our need for forgiveness, we will then be enabled to go forth and to
shine with the light of Christ and to point to him . . . to endeavor to wean
our neighbors from tepid, polluted water and lead them to the joyous wine of the
Kingdom of God and the marriage supper of the Lamb.
1 comment:
Thank you for this, my friend...
and I join you in prayer. : )
Post a Comment