My friend Michael O'Brien, whom I have admired for many years, composed some months ago a trenchant meditation on the situation we now find ourselves in. It's one we've known for some time would eventually be upon us. And now, it would appear that it’s here.
Consider this snippet from Michael’s sobering yet encouraging narrative. After you've read it, I’d recommend you take a moment to share it with your network of friends and family:
Our generation has chosen to resolve its dilemmas by saying that a certain sin which is killing us is not actually a sin. It has accepted the catastrophic lie that security lies in negating the fullness of our humanity. In such a dehumanized climate the heart and mind eventually begin to spring leaks and blow fuses. The soul cries out mutely with depressions, sicknesses, unacknowledged and unrepented guilt, fears and resentment of those who dare to contradict the fundamental compromise––the list goes on.
Our generation has chosen to resolve its dilemmas by saying that a certain sin which is killing us is not actually a sin. It has accepted the catastrophic lie that security lies in negating the fullness of our humanity. In such a dehumanized climate the heart and mind eventually begin to spring leaks and blow fuses. The soul cries out mutely with depressions, sicknesses, unacknowledged and unrepented guilt, fears and resentment of those who dare to contradict the fundamental compromise––the list goes on.
Above all, there a subconscious despair. It is precisely this despair which saps our life without our knowing it, bleeding away vital energies and driving us further and further into a complex of compromises. No restoration of the world will occur until this despair is recognized for what it is and replaced by hope. Little renewal of our Church in the West will come to pass until there is repentance, which is the foundation of hope. If we as a people and as individuals do not repent, then the Body of Christ in our part of the world will continue to deteriorate. However much we may deny the reality of our condition, if real medicine is not applied we may even come close to extinction. As St. James points out: “Sin, when it is full grown, brings death.” (James 1:15).
Genuine Christian hope is not a facile optimism nor is it a gloomy pessimism. It is a willingness to look into the face of a very difficult and confused state of affairs and find there the victory of good over evil. Yet we cannot truly understand the enormity of the victory if we blithely continue to think that all is well, or at least comfortably bad.
This is not the time to look back in anger but rather around in awareness and forward with hope. It is precisely at this moment in history, in the face of a growing culture of death, that Humanae Vitae’s prophetic dimension is being revealed as a message of hope. It bears repeating that hope is realism. It examines the damage done to our lives and to our community. It recognizes that a society which violates the conscience, directly or indirectly, is an anti-human one. . . (Continue reading)
