Do We Know What Life Is?

What has happened to our nation? How is it that we have forgotten what the meaning of life is? How have we entered into such darkness? The answer is sin.

GLADE PARK, Colorado (Catholic Online) - In his first papal homily, Pope Benedict XVI stated: "Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is."

It is apparent that our society has not only confused the meaning of life, but what life itself is. Let me explain:

According to recent surveys, one in four Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine say that they have no religious affiliation; the fastest growing religious group is those who say they have "no affiliation" with any particular religion; and the majority of Americans understand the Third Commandment, which obligates one to keep holy the Lord's day and worship God on Sunday, as not applicable to themselves: only forty percent of Americans attend weekly church services (The Pew Forum on religion & public life / U.S. Religious Landscape Survey http://religions.pewforum.org). All this is not indicative of a Christian nation whose soul has met "the living God in Christ".

There are other obvious and serious signs which indicate we have forsaken Wisdom, forgetting that our hearts will not rest until they rest in God. For not only has our nation lost the awareness of our duty to seek God in truth and obedience, but we have made trade with life, exchanging a priceless opportunity to defeat Roe v. Wade for valueless, imagined economic promise and platitudinous notions of "hope" and "change".

Further, many talk of combating the evils in the world, the need for greater compassion, and the worthy causes of peace and justice; yet when some lone voice insists the point of beginning is to protect the utterly helpless, a silence envelops the room, the subject is changed, and talk erupts of the indigent in Africa or of understanding the plight of the immigrants.

Compassion, service, loving thy neighbor as thyself; these are, certainly, worthy things. They are the way of our Lord. Yet we are not embracing them. It is clearly evident that our society has entered into darkness. Wisdom is quickly and quietly drifting away as so much smoke on the wind. We do not know what life is.

The Holy Father continued: "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."

True it is. Yet we have forsaken our littlest loves, the sweet and innocent whose only shelter is their mother's womb. We refuse to act as if each of us is necessary. Those who live for their first breath, their father's first kiss, they are being extinguished. The voiceless, in silence, are denied life - they are relegated to the unnecessary. They are denied the chance to be tried in the fires of God's love that they may mature in their love for Christ as his warriors. They are removed from the opportunity to love Christ to the fullest through the action of living in love, as all Christians are called to do. And we have, horrifically, wrecked the lives of over fifty-million of these precious children, the unborn whose eyes were forbidden to gaze into their mother's. How can we talk of peace and justice? How can we say we are a nation of Christians? We do not know what life is.

In a strike to the heart, one which shows the stark reality of our situation, another recent survey showed that only sixteen percent of Americans say that abortion should not be permitted under any circumstances, which means that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe killing an unborn child is acceptable under certain circumstances (Ibid.).

From where does this type of belief come? How is it that we can say to the unborn: "My child, I'm sorry, but you're going to be killed because of something bad that happened in your mother's past." That is precisely what we are saying when we think it proper to kill the unborn whose life is the result of some evil they had nothing whatsoever to do with.

What has happened to our nation? How is it that we have forgotten what the meaning of life is? How have we entered into such darkness? The answer is sin.

1 Corinthians (2:14-15), tells us: "The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned." And John 9:39 teaches us that love of God causes true vision; that is wisdom; while sin is the cause of blindness.

St. Augustine reveals the love of light in contrast to the love of sin: "So it is that two cities have been made by two loves: the earthly city by love of self to the exclusion of God, the heavenly by love of God to the exclusion of self."

Our society has built a city by the "love of self to the exclusion of God". Such a city will not stand for the simple reason that it is set against God. Abortion must be stopped. We cannot continue on like this, for the blood is flowing. Our little children are being discarded, silently buried, not in the earth, but in garbage containers as so much trash, or disposed of in America's sewers. Yes, harsh words for a harsh reality. The evil of abortion is cancelling out any attempts we make at good as a nation. We cannot speak of social justice around the world, for the poor, for the immigrants, if we continue to condone the barbaric acts of abortion.

What is the answer? Just as our Holy Father said, "Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is." In order to meet the "living God in Christ" we must embrace our holy Catholic Church, for she is the gateway to Christ. It is through her, through the sacraments, through her doctrines regarding faith and morals that we truly come to know Christ. She is a beacon of light set upon a hill; the one voice of truth left in the world. Let us turn to her.

This is, of course, called conversion. It is won by obedience. Let us seek it. Let us, too, seek the shelter of our heavenly Mother who oversees the children of her Church; the Immaculate Heart of our most sweet Virgin. It is through her tenderness that the graces will flow from Christ, healing a badly damaged society. In mind of all these things, let us live the Catholic life always and everywhere. Then we shall know what life is. Then we shall truly see. Then we shall prevail!

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F. K. Bartels is a Catholic freelance writer who operates www.catholicpathways.com. He may be reached via email at: bartels@catholicpathways.com

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