Today too the Church and the successors of the Apostles are told to put out into the deep sea of history and to let down the nets, so as to win men and women over to the Gospel - to God, to Christ, to true life. The Fathers made a very significant commentary on this singular task. This is what they say: for a fish, created for water, it is fatal to be taken out of the sea, to be removed from its vital element to serve as human food. But in the mission of a fisher of men, the reverse is true. We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendour of God's light, into true life. It is really true: as we follow Christ in this mission to be fishers of men, we must bring men and women out of the sea that is salted with so many forms of alienation and onto the land of life, into the light of God. It is really so: the purpose of our lives is to revealGod to men. And only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.
*Bold italics added for emphasis
Read the full version of Pope Benedict XVI’s homily here.
4 comments:
dont you think it is a touch of hubris to want to be the center, the end of creation and thus the universe? the universe doesn't care about you. get over it.
If we are not the crown jewel of creation, i.e., if there is no God and hence no objective morality, being hubristic doesn't bother me.
Moral criticisms like this only work from inside the system. One can't borrow morality to bash other people when it is convenient.
that is quite a leap there you make, logan. i generally expect that you are self-critical enough to know that dostoevsky, along with the rest of this stripe of theistic morality, is mistaken (as the existentialists clearly corrected) in that morality does not end with the 'end' of God. besides, the universe not caring whether or not you exist has nothing to do with the existence or lack there of, of God. God certainly 'existed' for the Greeks, and the universe was not apathetic to their existence, but downright hostile.
anyway, come to boston and play with me!!
First, you're going to have to lay out the atheistic existenialists' argument/s for retaining morality with out retaining God. Just saying they "clearly corrected" my argument doesn't enlighten me. I don't see how it is possible to retain the traditional notion of "theistic morality." If all you are saying is we can live by different rules without God, I don't disagree. But this is not the idea of universal/binding moral obligations that we started with. I'd like to see you defend the simultaneous existence of universal, binding moral law and God's nonexistence.
Second, were you seriously speaking literaly when you said "the universe doesn't care about you"? I took it as a metaphor for either God's nonexistence or God's apathy (in which case he's probably not much of a moral law giver/enforcer). And actually, this is exactly what we see in the Greeks. If nature is to them hostile/whimsical, it is clearly because they did NOT believe in God. They believed in whimsical and hostile gods.
P.S. I really do want to get up to Boston. I've never been there.
Post a Comment