Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Mensch: Sakrament Gottes (Schöpfung) - rein materiellen Wesen; Zivilisation: was wir denken und glauben

Kurzinhalt: Unwilling to be God's image in the world and unable, whatever claims some may make to the contrary, to become God in any serious sense of the word, modern man seeks high and low for something, almost anything, to inform him ...

Textausschnitt: MAN: CIPHER OR SACRAMENT

80b If God created man in his image, then, even prior to the Incarnation, in the very order of creation itself, man is sacramentally linked to God. When man refuses to be the sacrament of God, the only definition God has inscribed in his being, he continues to exist as a material being, but he is no longer a sign or symbol but only a cipher, signifying nothing whatsoever. (Fs) (notabene)

80c Unwilling to be God's image in the world and unable, whatever claims some may make to the contrary, to become God in any serious sense of the word, modern man seeks high and low for something, almost anything, to inform him, to give him an identity: the cosmic consciousness of New Age, the magic and witchcraft of goddess mythology, the archetypes ofjungian psychology, Joseph Campbell's hero of a thousand faces, Carl Sagan's voyage through the cosmos, the cults of Elvis and Marilyn and Madonna, Robin Leach's visits with the rich and famous, 1-900's psychic counselors and personal astrologers, and even in alarming numbers the demonic powers promised by Satanic cults. Virtually no stone is left unturned in this frenetic search for some hint or clue as to where to go from here. As Walker Percy, the novelist and convert to the Catholic faith, said in a self-interview published in Esquire in December 1977: "Despite the catastrophes of this century and man's total failure to understand himself and deal with himself, people still labor under the illusion that a theory of man exists. It doesn't. As bad and confused as things are, they have to get even worse before people realize they don't have the faintest idea what sort of creature man is. Then they might want to know."1

81a Man is created to be the image of God, the sacrament of God. He is created, in short, to make visible in the world, as male and female in the union of marital love, the invisible reality of divine love. The catch to this in creation, as noted earlier, comes in the form of the command. The catch to this in redemption comes in the form of the cross. This is the primary meaning of the cross, according to John Paul II: "Love not only uplifts us, takes us out of ourselves; it also lays burdens on us. And perhaps the burdens tell us more about love than do the moments of ecstasy and spiritual elan."2

81b Today, we are in flight from the burdens divine love implants within us and lays upon us. We are far more interested in our rights than in our responsibilities, in what we can claim from others than in what we can give to them. But even in this fallen state we have brought upon ourselves, we can never entirely destroy the good creation of God and that human imaging of him which constitutes man's greatest glory and his greatest suffering. (Fs)

81c As Philip Rieff notes in his book The Triumph of the Therapeutic,

There is no feeling more desperate than that of being free to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of being chosen. After all, one does not really choose; one is chosen. This is one way of stating the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen. What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices seriously.3

82a We have lost the sense of being chosen; we have lost gratitude; we have lost responsible freedom, the taking seriously of the choices we make. (Fs)

82b As Paul Johnson notes, "In the last resort, our civilization is what we think and believe. The externals matter, but they cannot stand if the inner convictions which originally produced them have vanished."4 The most urgent task facing Christians in society today is to be a visible image, a living sacrament, and thus a prophetic witness to the reality of divine love, to the reality that we have been chosen, to the reality that the burdens of love can be embraced and sustained. Only when Christians are willing to do this will we see a genuine renewal of both the Church and the world. (Fs)