Which direction in this Year of Faith?

Which Direction in this Year of Faith?
In pursuit of the truth - cinops be gone - Saturday, Nov. 3, 2012

Here is another classic from Ratzinger’s Co-Workers of the Truth - Oct. 31st meditation.

“What directions does a person choose for his existence if he has decided to tune the instrument of his life to the keynote of “faith”? This question is not an easy one to answer because it obviously reaches down to the deeper levels of human nature, to attributes that are not always visible on the surface but that penetrate and leave their imprint on the whole, yet without being anywhere measurable.

“All the important fundamental of human existence that go beyond our ordinary concern about the details of every day living can be understood if we ourselves make some small effort to enter into the movement from which they flow - whether it is a question of a great love, of the passion of the inventor, or of a renunciation required of those who devote their lives to a revolutionary idea; whether is a question of the attitude expressed in the smile of the Buddha or the faith of a Christian….

“We can explain what faith really means for any individual only by pointing to the lives of those who have lived it in its fullness: Francis of Assisi, Francis Xavier, Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Vincent de Paul, John XXIII; in such persons, and basically only in them, can we come to know what kind of decision faith is.

“As we can see in the lives of such individuals faith is a kind of passion, or, more correctly, a love that seizes an individual and shows him the direction the must go, however fatiguing it may be - the spiritual equivalent, perhaps, of a mountain to climb, which to the ordinary Christian would seem foolish indeed but to one who has committed himself to the venture is clearly the only direction to take - a direction he would not exchange for any conceivably more comfortable one.”

George H. Kubeck,

P.S. “The existence of Jesus Christ and his message has introduced a new dynamic into humanity, and the Church is, as it were, nothing other than this dynamic, this beginning of humanity’s movement toward God… In the lives of the saints, this dynamic has reached exemplary proportions…. The fact that Nietzsche and Marx, all too often, replaced biblical readings evidences the rapidity with which a false purism avenges itself and is transformed into its opposite.

“The uniqueness of the Christ-event does not depreciate human life but rather gives it share in the power of his presence. In the great personages of faith from Polycarp to Maximilian Kolbe we have genuine example of what life in imitation of Christ really is - we see the challenge and the hope of such a life.

“Each of them is an exegesis of Jesus; in them he becomes concrete. Anyone who begins to consider the lives of the saints finds there an inexhaustible richness of histories that are more than homiletic models; the confirmation of the call of Christ through centuries full of blood and tears.

“Only when we have rediscovered the saints will we also rediscover the Church and in doing so will likewise rediscover the Lord himself as one who lived amid all the darkness, who will not die again, who will not leave us orphans.” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth - Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1992 Nov. 2nd Meditation.