As we head towards Holy Week and the Paschal celebration, it is sobering to read this piece published by Fairfax Media yesterday. Entitled "Why I don't take my kids to church?", the view proposed here is that the Easter Bunny providing Easter eggs is a better bet as an explainable saviour-figure than Jesus himself.
It is always good to be reminded that what we Christians take for granted as "good news" is not so for many non-Christians and (in this case) post-Christians.
I sympathise with the writer to the degree that her life story involves major events in which God has seemed absent in her life. But I note with concern the "semiotics" of the article posted a week before Easter: the secular media goes not to a Christian to explain why Easter means so much to them but to a post-Christian to explain why she does not send her kids to church. Message received loud and clear, Fairfax!
Disclaimer: the church the opinion writer happens to pooh-pooh is the Catholic church. I am not linking to this column to join her negativity about Catholic Christianity. The central concern she raises could have been raised whether she had been brought up Pentecostal, Baptist or even Anglican!
4 comments:
" the secular media goes not to a Christian to explain why Easter means so much to them but to a post-Christian to explain why she does not send her kids to church." - Peter -
Your comment here, Peter, says it all. A 'post-Christian' surely would NEVER send her/his children to Church - for the very reason that S/He no longer believes in Christ. Why would they bother?
This is why the young, themselves, have to be encouraged by someone else to attend Church. Then they might influence - for the good - their elders.
Holy Week began beautifully today at SMAA with the Procession of Palms, the Solem Passion Gospel of Matthew, followed by the Eucharist. This will be followed by a Daily Evening Mass and Meditation leading up to the solemnities of the Solemn Triduum and the First Mass of the Resurrection.
Nothing like Holy Week to excite the exercise of The Faith once delivered..
The neo marxists who run our world learned well from the Soviet Union and have improved upon it
The West of course is dying, nearly 50 years ago the USA could put a man on the moon, today they cannot even put a man into low earth orbit, The Great ships were built on the Clyde, today they are built in South Korea as are most of the cars we drive and the sail to the West loaded to the gunwales with trinkets paid for with borrowed money and sail back East with empty containers or container filled with recyclables - it costs about half the price to ship a container East as it does to ship one West
And for a woman a career trumps family and for a man with a family the Sword of Damocles hangs over his head should his wife or the mother of his children (since marriage like Christianity is dying) decide to pull the pin. Why risk it?
I see there was a massacre of Coptic Christians this Palm Sunday, new Martyrs in the Middle East - in the West the Faith is dying through indifference as we place value on Chinese trinkets while in the East those of the Faith are martyred and our masters lie to us about the causes
What a choice between chocolate and salvation ... Smile... Or is it the guilt of chocolate consumption versus the conviction of sin!
Actually I don't believe the lady interviewed is so secular she refers to praying in her hard times because it is familiar and comforting. she refers to Christianity being more complicated than the Easter bunny in terms of explaination. I am not sure if that is a worry or a relief.
I do believe Fr Ron we will find children evangelising more... Just this last week I heard talk of a young, say 12 year old girl, who announced she was a Christian. The only other one in her family who is one also is her younger brother "because I told him about the stories of Jesus and he was amazed". How humbling the young can be.
Thank you, Jean. This makes sense of the prayer of Jesus: "I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and clever - revealing them to mere children, as it has pleased you to do"
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