Sunday, November 11, 2012

Devotion for today: be exemplary Christians

This excerpt is from an Address of his Eminence Cardinal Ivan Dias on the occasion of the Anglican Conference of Lambeth, Tuesday, July 22, 2008:

…The missionary mandate thus makes us enter into the very heart of God, who wills all men, women and children to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the Truth…The theme of evangelization must be considered in the wider context of the spiritual combat which began in the Garden of Eden with the fall of our first parents, in the wake of fierce hostilities between God and the rebel angels. If this context is ignored in favor of a myopic world-vision, Christ’s salvation will be conveniently dismissed as irrelevant. The spiritual combat, described in the Books of Genesis and Revelation, has continued unabated down the ages. St. Paul described it in very vivid terms: “We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12).

This combat rages fiercely even today, aided and abetted by well-known secret sects, satanic groups and New Age movements, to mention but a few, and reveals many ugly heads of the hideous anti-God monster: among them are notoriously secularism, which seeks to build a Godless society; spiritual indifference, which is insensitive to transcendental values; and relativism, which is contrary to the permanent tenets of the Gospel. All of these seek to efface any reference to God or to things supernatural, and to supplant it with mundane values and behavior patterns which purposely ignore the transcendental and the divine. Far from satisfying the deep yearnings of the human heart, they foster a culture of death, be it physical or moral, spiritual or psychological.

Examples of this culture are abortions on demand (or the slaughter of innocent unborn children), divorces (which kill sacred marriage bonds blessed by God), materialism and moral aberrations (which suffocate the joy of living and lead often to profound psychic depression), economic, social and political injustices (which crush human rights), violence, suicides, murders, and the like, all of which abound today and militate against the mind of Christ, who came that “all may have life, and have it in abundance” (John 10:10).

…This mosaic of religious and cultural- “isms” is now complicated by a deep questioning about man’s identity and purpose in life, rising from the human and social, as well as the physical sciences. While this soul-searching questioning about human life and purpose could be an appropriate context for the proclamation of the Gospel, many answers being proposed in our post-modern world have become disconnected from authoritative sources of moral reasoning, ignoring the transcendental dimension of life and seeking to make God irrelevant….

In the first Christian era, the pagans were attracted to the Christian faith because of the way Christians behaved, and they remarked: “See how they love each other.” This Christian witness is well described in the Letter to Diognetus, written by a Christian apologist in the second century. I deem it wise to quote some excerpts of this Letter, which would make many a Christian pastor to think and some even to blush.

“The difference between Christians and the rest of mankind is not a matter of nationality, or language or customs. Christians do not live apart in separate cities of their own, speak any special dialect, nor practice any eccentric way of life. The doctrine they profess is not the invention of busy human minds and brains, nor are they adherents of this or that school of human thought. They pass their lives in whatever township… each man’s lot has determined, and conform to ordinary local usage in their clothing, diet, and other habits. Nevertheless, the organization of their community does exhibit some features that are remarkable, and even surprising. For instance, though they are residents at home in their own countries, their behavior there is more like that of transients; they take their full part as citizens, but they also submit to anything and everything as if they were aliens. For them, any foreign country is a motherland, and any motherland is a foreign country.

“To put it briefly, the relation of Christian to the world is that of a soul to the body. As the soul is diffused through every part of the body, so are Christians through all the cities of the world…. Such is the high post of duty in which God has placed them, and it is their moral duty not to shrink from it”….

This is, in short, what Christian witness is all about, and what the world needs today…. The world today needs Christian apologists, not apologizers; it needs persons like John Henry Cardinal Newman, G.K. Chesterton, C.S.Lewis, Hilaire Belloc and others, who brilliantly expose the beauty of the Christian faith without blushing or compromise….

 

Can we add our names to the above list?

 

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