Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Road to Life
(Extract: Peter on the Shore)
When choosing to take up our cross, it is not so much that we are choosing between a life without crosses and a life with crosses, as deciding which cross to choose, or what meaning to give to the crosses that are part and parcel of our very existence. Cross and suffering are inescapable realities. It is not only Christians who have to go to the hospital, and it is not only Christians who have to bear moral sufferings, or who have to pay a price to attain their ideals.
The mystery of suffering touches every human life. Every person born on this earth has to face his own mortality. And how he does so determines how he lives and his impositions on those around him.
Our consumer society today has set its parameters wholly within the material world, opting for its fleeting satisfactions and comforts, and the cult of the body. In the process it has bred a culture of death and egotism, a grinding and dehumanizing reduction of man to the material, where he has no greater value than a tree or snaildarter.
To save our society, to give it some hope, we are going to have to take Christ at his word, believe that his cross is the only road to life, and live and preach that, giving this same hope to everyone around us. As we search for our vocation, we should not make the mistake of looking for the wide and easy way. Even less should we commit the injustice of preaching the wide and easy way as the way of life - for it is precisely the way that has led to the despair and suicide into which our western civilization is falling.
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