Called to be saints
Garvey, John
JOHN GARVEY CALLED TO BE SAINTS Our salvation is at hand People who have rejected religion commonly offer one of two reasons. The first is a question: How can you believe in a good God when you...
...And yet the Eucharist is with us: every Sunday we offer God bread and wine, and God offers us the presence of the Lord, with us until he comes again...
...We dumb our religion down...
...There really is a horror here, and it isn't enough for us to say that it has always been this way...
...or worse, we convince ourselves that we are pretty much where we ought to be in our relationship with God...
...How seriously can one take a teaching that has so little apparent effect...
...God has made us free even to ignore God completely...
...People have murdered one another in the name of God...
...Plainly, there is something that does not love humankind, that delights in destruction, and it has had its way with much of our century...
...The birth of Jesus- God coming to us vulnerable and needy, dependent on Mary's acceptance and obedience-and his teaching, and finally his death on the cross, give us everything we need to know...
...Instead of feeling warm and cozy about it, we should allow Christmas to break our hearts...
...and at the same time, God has done everything to show us what love means...
...Believers enjoy its therapeutic uses...
...What of the first objection-that the sort of world we live in reveals that if God exists he is not good...
...our hearts...
...We don't need to go as far as the horrors of slaughter to see this...
...Within the last few years we have seen Catholic priests participating in the slaughters in Rwanda, and Orthodox priests blessing the troops on their murderous way in the former Yugoslavia...
...But very few take it seriously enough to threaten them with any serious change...
...We nod at that, but true as the point may be, we agree too easily...
...The first is a question: How can you believe in a good God when you see the sorts of things that happen in the world he allegedly created...
...In On the Incarnation, Saint Athanasius told us that God became human so that human beings might become God...
...This involves the body of Christ, not simply unresponsive individuals...
...If God must go to this extreme to get our attention, and if we are still capable of ignoring the lesson, the evil is thick indeed...
...The terror of it is that we are...
...This cannot, however, be laid at God's feet...
...To find us ignoring it, asleep, deluded...
...Religion is praised by liberals and conservatives alike-even unbelieving ones-wherever it happens to correspond with their own agendas...
...The second reason is based on the record of religion...
...If anything on earth could be used as an illustration of human perversity it is our ability to listen to the words of the gospel and then go on living the way we do...
...it is ironic (and perhaps even intended) that this denial should happen in our era...
...Few of us respond to what we have been given in any but the most feeble ways...
...His teaching tells us that we must forgive and love one another without exception, and the cross shows us the extent to which that love must go...
...it has been found difficult and left untried...
...What did they think they were doing eucharistically...
...Religion plainly does not go very deeply into us...
...It is related to the second objection to Christianity, in its focus on evil-an evil that is the responsibility of human beings, but an evil that plainly is in charge of many lives, and has a deathly effect on the innocents who get in its way...
...at the very least, they ignore the plain meaning of the gospel the moment its meaning might inconvenience them...
...Christians are and always have been the most serious obstacle to the spread of Christianity...
...Well," we say, "we aren't all meant to be saints...
...Chesterton has been quoted here frequently: Christianity has not been tried and found wanting...
...It is praised for its social usefulness, its encouragement of public morality (but only up to a point), and good citizenship...
...Our daily ability to harden our hearts, to make judgments of others, to ignore the agonies all around us, is proof enough...
...What can be said of murderous priests...
...There is a glib way of denying the existence of real evil, of Satan...
...At times it seems that only a handful of people-the fathers and mothers of the desert, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Seraphim of Sarov-have really understood and responded to what baptism means...
...Anyone who professes to be a Christian bears some responsibility for this, because we are saved or damned together...
...At any given moment someone is being tortured to death, children are being abused, our century has seen the attempted murder of entire races, and God sees and tolerates it all...
...The argument is almost an anger at God for his failure to exist, or at least for his failure to stop people from acting the way they do...
Vol. 123 • December 1996 • No. 22
