On the one side, we can laugh at the idiocies to which a society without God will descend. On the other hand, crazy though it may seem, we could see this new “religion” as a desperate cry for help; people without God, looking for God, and in their desperation, trying out any trace of what promises to be some power greater than human beings, even the fantasies of a commercial movie.
In the late 1960s, Andrew Greeley, in his book the Persistence of Religion, described how occult religions were mushrooming on American university campuses where Christianity had been rejected. Why? He came to the conclusion that there is in man a deep-seated need to worship God, and that in the absence of Christianity, these strange cults were the nearest the students could come to communicating with spiritual powers greater than themselves.
A hundred years before, the great Cardinal Newman described man without God as “a great river cramped into a narrow channel”. Only God, he said, can “elicit the ten thousand senses of which a human being is capable”. Fifteen hundred years before either Greeley or Newman, St. Augustine said simply, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You, O God.”
Never in our history has there been an era like ours, when man has tried on such a grand scale to do without God. Never has there been such an era of darkness, death, destruction, squalor and hopelessness. And never before has man sought God in such a variety of twisted and monstrous forms, from the ugly cults of California to the ideologies of the east which have laid waste to whole nations and lands.
Man seeks and longs for God with all his heart. Man without God, a world without God, is a dry, empty husk. What the Psalmist recognises of himself is true of the whole modern world. "O God, you are my God, for you I long," he says. "For you my soul is thirsting."
This is not a general feeling that things are all right without God, but better with him. Without God there is a terrible emptiness, one which threatens life itself, for unquenched thirst leads to death. In even stronger terms, the psalmist restates the sense of desperate emptiness which is the lot of one who is far from God: "My body pines for you, like a dry, weary land without water." When we pine for something, or someone, we feel so empty at the lack that we cannot eat, sleep, think or talk about anything else. Our whole being is consumed when we pine. We endure an emotional emptiness which is so intense it becomes physical, and which leaves us in a state of weariness, of exhaustion.
Underneath all the brashness, sneering and apparent self-confidence of the godless, this is the real state of his heart, a state which can be brutally exposed when his support system is blown away. Man longs with all his heart for the fulfillment which only communion with God can give, whether he knows it or not. How blessed are we who to whom God has revealed himself. How blessed are we who can know him and love him in the person of Jesus Christ. God has asked us to be a light in the darkness, to spread his work through our own words, work and example. He has made us, his Church, his people, to be a light in the darkness. Let us take up this task today, as he has called us. Through us may he provide light in the darkness, fulfillment in place of emptiness and love in place of longing.
Fr Phillip
No comments:
Post a Comment