Pastor's Letter-- July 19, 2020

While I am away on vacation, I thought it might be nice to share a bit of what I’m reading. This book, titled From Christendom to Apostolic Mission, was published last year by the University of Mary and outlines the new cultural landscape we must work within as a church in the United States. The main point is two or more generations ago we had a basic Christian “current” that guided our culture; now that is no longer the case, so we have to swim against the current. These selections from later in the book (really a long essay) presents our primary task in our time.

"In an apostolic time, those who present the gospel, whether to their parishes or to their families, should assume that the majority of the hearers are unconverted or half-converted in mind and imagination and have embraced to some degree the dominant non-Christian vision. The new evangelization aims at the renewal of the mind, because it recognizes that people's minds have been barraged by a daily onslaught of false Gospels, leading to confusion and distraction away from the invisible realities to concerns solely of this world. Preaching in an apostolic age needs to begin with the appeal to a completely different way of seeing things; it needs to offer a different narrative concerning the great human drama; it needs to aim to put into place the key elements of the integrated Christian vision of the world within which the moral and spiritual disciplines that the church imposes find their place. "It is a strategic mistake to preach solely the moral vision of Christianity before the mind and overall vision have at least begun to be transformed. It is putting the cart before the horse. The reason so much of the church's moral teaching falls on deaf ears in our time is because it makes no sense according to the ruling vision of the society. As long as that vision holds its way in an individual mind, teaching about moral truth (except were Christian moral precepts line up with those of the ruling vision) will be ineffective and will produce either bewilderment or anger.

…Concerning The Christian Way of Seeing...
"Christianity is the most shockingly momentous view of what it means to be human that has ever been seriously believed and pursued. The weight of this momentousness is both thrilling and terrifying. Much of the modern flight from Christianity, when it does not stem from boredom with a watered-down conventional version of the faith, is precisely a flight from the seriousness of existence at the heart of the Christian vision, and refusal to attempt to scale the heights that all humans are called to in Christ. "In the Christian vision, to be a human is to be involved in an extraordinary adventure. The greatest adventure stories ever written are only echoes of it, pale shadows of what the lowliest human is in truth undergoing. This drama began before we were born and will continue after we die, and each of us has been given a unique role to play in it. An integral aspect of this drama is that we have been born into an invisible world as well as a visible one, and the invisible world is incomparably more real, more lasting, more beautiful, and larger than the visible. Our blindness to that world represents much of our predicament. We are caught by the illusion of the merely seen and need to have our blindness cured. This drama involves not only with the awful and marvelous and incomprehensible being of God, who created us with a decisive purpose in mind, but also with the cosmic struggle among creatures of spirit more powerful than we are, who influence human life for both good and evil. We have been born into a battle, and we are given the fearful and dignifying burden of choice: we need to take a side. Every human has been created for a magnificent destiny that makes the greatest prices of this world seem like uninteresting nothings, a destiny of such height that the imagination can hardly take it in…”

This is the work of evangelization: offering a different way of seeing life. I pray our parish can continue to grow in this and we all can bring this most important good news to the world. There is nothing greater to live for!