Today is the feast of John the Baptist – a fitting day to begin a Blog dedicated to renewal in the Church. The reading in today’s Morning Prayer, in the Divine Office, includes this:
23 Lo, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, Before the day of the LORD comes, the great and terrible day,
24 To turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, Lest I come and strike the land with doom. (Mal 3)
How is this reading and prophecy so appropriate to the call for Church renewal? Listen to it, in the light of our Church led by our fathers in Christ! We call our priests “Father”, for they are ordained to be fathers to us and for us in Jesus Christ. In this year especially dedicated to the priesthood, begun June 19, on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Church is calling us, priests and laity, to be especially attentive to the holy priesthood. That is, we “children” are to turn our hearts to our spiritual fathers. Our spiritual fathers, our priests and bishops, are to turn their hearts to their spiritual children – lest God come to strike this spiritual land, this Promised Land His Church, with doom.
Listening to the reading in this way, I can see how relevant and piercing it becomes. How we need holy, sacrificial priests and bishops! How we need a laity submitted and obedient to such fathers in Christ – because we need a people, a Church, submitted to Christ. We need this, and the world needs this, because the world awaits true, authentic living witnesses to the radical truth of God and His Gospel.
The world does not need one more lukewarm, distracted and bored assembly. The People of God does not need more “company men” in the place of her priests and bishops, who say what is popular and what sells, who trouble no one, who reveal Christ to no one, who call no one to Life. The Church needs holy priests and bishops. The Church needs fathers whose hearts are turned to their children in truth, in authentic sacrificial love.
We as laity have expected too little of our fathers, our priests and bishops. Instead, we have accepted the compromise. As long as they refrain from the hard parts of the Gospel and of following Christ, we are free to chase after the pleasures and comforts of this world. As long as the Liturgy is quick, our Sunday drive-through, we too can keep merely on the surface of it all, blind to the holy, the eternal, the transforming. We remain untouched by the Cross, what light there is remains under a basket and the world remains in the dead idolatries of darkness.
Fathers, turn your hearts to your children! Children, turn your hearts – your hearts – to your fathers! We do not love our priests and bishops enough, even though, granted, many of them make it difficult for us to love them in truth. Many priests and bishops keep themselves isolated and fortified against the fullness of love that would call them deeper into the depths and heights of their exalted vocation in Christ.
How we need truth among us! We need the truth of love, as well as the love of truth. May the Lord give us His grace, the grace of love, the grace to love. The Church will remain as she is – largely weak, divided, confused, shallow and ineffective – until the transforming power of Christ is welcomed and is received within us all. Business as usual is unacceptable in the light of the Cross of Christ. He did not die to enable mediocrity, but rather sanctity.
Thomas Richard