Contemporary western culture turns on a basic fact: the
experience of the individual is to be the deciding factor in the conduct of our
affairs and in our process of determining what is true. Individuals in the west
are today portable and self-contained: we don’t normally live in the same place
all our lives, or do so the same thing. This runs counter to the experience of
ancestors in faith even as recently as two generations ago. There are many
people who bewail this. But, we cannot become first-century people, or tenth-century
people, or even people from the 1950s. Our history has happened and is happening.
We never move backward in time – only forward. So what we need to do is this:
Not opt out of history (since we really can’t) but find ways in our own time in
which we encounter the sacred and speak that to our world. It isn’t our job to
keep an old way of life from drifting into memory. It IS our task to undertake
the awesome charge to transform our lives and the world around us according to
the message of the Gospel as we receive it. We are not museum keepers – we are
disciples.
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