Thursday, April 4, 2013

Moving on


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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