Actions and Prayers -- Part 1

The circumstance of our Christian lives presents many opportunities for us to show our love, compassion, and mercy. If we accept Christianity’s belief in social justice, we must also accept the inherent call to action that is necessary to bring the teachings and ideas about social justice alive. Before joining the Church, I gave social justice a cursory wink between deciding which restaurant and which sale to investigate this week.

The Church presents us with an expectation regarding ongoing concern and effort toward social justice. All Christians are called to action. All Christians must do God’s work. Our lives should reflect God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s compassion, God’s forgiveness. Modernity encourages haste and instant gratification. Modernity is spasmodic and enmeshed in tangled webs of individual rights, individual freedoms, individual selfishness.

When we act in God’s name by helping the less fortunate and those who can not help themselves, our actions become indomitable, shimmering and glittering with goodness; our actions reveal something exceptional and ethereal; our actions can contain a powerful magnetism which encourages our recidivism; and our actions are often at odds with the buckwheat flecked, caffeinated worldview of our society where all problems are solved by the government, philanthropists, or foundations; our actions allow us to be humble servants of God; we must always remember to reach toward God like Michelango’s Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel.

There is something obdurate in the ease and poise that is employed in avoiding animating the Church’s social justice principles. As Christians there should be no compromise, our lives should include prayers and volunteer work for the vulnerable.

The zest of Christianity is universal love, universal concern. Action by each one of us who call ourselves Christians is needed. We must be willing to pull back the glossy veneer of society and to offer whatever assistance we can. We must remember to always be courteous. We must remember to always pray.

Our prayers may reflect our true feelings, our true fears, our true hopes.

Huddled with a couple of floppy pillows beneath a quilt in dramatic fashion I am asleep dreaming of the malignant advance of avarice, apathy, acarology, and alchemy and world domination with fast sports cars, foot fights on deserted European promenades, and guns on deck-chairs.