“Caritas Christi urget nos” (2 Cor 5:14 ): it is the love of Christ that fills our
hearts and impels us to evangelize. Today as in the past, he sends us through
the highways of the world to proclaim his Gospel to all the peoples of the
earth (cf. Mt 28:19). Through his love, Jesus Christ attracts to himself
the people of every generation: in every age he convokes the Church, entrusting
her with the proclamation of the Gospel by a mandate that is ever new.
Today too, there is a need for stronger ecclesial commitment
to new evangelization in order to rediscover the joy of believing and the
enthusiasm for communicating the faith. In rediscovering his love day by day,
the missionary commitment of believers attains force and vigour that can never
fade away. Faith grows when it is lived as an experience of love received and
when it is communicated as an experience of grace and joy. It makes us
fruitful, because it expands our hearts in hope and enables us to bear
life-giving witness: indeed, it opens the hearts and minds of those who listen
to respond to the Lord’s invitation to adhere to his word and become his
disciples.
Believers, so Saint Augustine
Only through
believing, then, does faith grow and become stronger; there is no other
possibility for possessing certitude with regard to one’s life apart from
self-abandonment, in a continuous crescendo, into the hands of a love that
seems to grow constantly because it has its origin in God.
Porta
Fidei 7
Reflection – The above passage is written in simple, plain language. The choice
of words is common, everyday, basic religious vocabulary. It is tempting to
slide over this passage—at the risk of sounding cynical, we can pass over such
texts as ‘boilerplate religious rhetoric.’
This would be a dreadful mistake. The
thought contained in this short passage from Porta Fidei is radical and
profound, and we would do well to meditate on it at length. Faith grows when it
is experienced as love received and communicated as grace and joy. Only through
believing does faith grow stronger. The only possibility for possessing
certitude in life is self-abandonment into the hands of a love that grows
continually because it has its origin in God.
There is a whole vision of life, a whole
program of life contained in these three simple sentences alone. Faith is not
some dry sterile intellectual exercise or worse, a clutching at straws in the
face of a cold dead universe.
Faith is diving into the vast ocean of
love, receiving and giving love, abandoning oneself to the Gospel, to living
the commandment of love and all the exciting exhausting demands it makes on us
daily. Faith is, as Catherine Doherty loved to quote, to throw one’s life at
the foot of the Cross and sing and sing that you should give him such a little
thing.
It is a love affair, and it is a love
affair that calls us, pushes us, urges us, into a deeper and deeper love for
all humanity, for every man, woman, child, for our enemies, for strangers on
the other side of the world and for the people closest to us—our neighbor.
And this love affair, this faith only grows
by abandoning ourselves to it. By living as if it were true and as if we
believed it with all our hearts. ‘Do what you would do if you were holy,’
someone recently quoted C.S. Lewis to me as saying. Enter the passion of love,
the way of the Cross which is not only suffering and sorrow, but service and
song as well.
This is how our life is made secure, not by
vain futile scrabbling to carve out some safe place for ourselves in this
passing world, but by self-abandonment and totality of self-gift.
I am aware as I write this, of course, that
all of this is just words, words, words. It has to be lived to be known as
reality, as fire and light, cleansing water and our food and drink, as a truth
deep and broad and secure enough to be truly the path of life.
Perhaps it is impossible, or at any rate
very difficult to give expression to the deep truth of life without falling
into the trap of banality and boilerplate rhetoric. But in this year of faith,
we begin with the words, with the proclamation, and then move with his grace
beyond words to the love and life that shows forth the face of Christ and the
truth of the Gospel to the world. Let us pray for this grace.
It helps, now and again, to step back and take the long view.
ReplyDeleteThe kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church's mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about: We plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds that are already planted, knowing that they hold a future promise. We lay the foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast ythat produces effects beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are the workers not the master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own. Amen
Archbishop Oscar Romero ( murdered during the Eucharist 24 March 1980)