We live in a time of institutionalized sin. We accept all types of deceptions, falsifications, and temptations. Our secular cultures abuses us with all types of scandals and rumors which encourage and nourish all types of vices and sins to fester and grow within our hearts with greed, selfishness, and other undesirable, unloving traits promoted as beneficial and natural.
As Christians we accept that we are sinners and try to avoid sinning. The Church reminds us to love our neighbors as ourselves, to worship only God.
Still the sinning and temptation continue, but we have the lessons from the Gospels leading us to the power and glory of God.
Sinfulness causes our hearts and souls to feel fatigued, confuses us. The glamor of evil is a serpentine road which crosses itself several times; it is a harsh course full of discontent, anxiety, selfishness of heartlessness, of fear, of destructive inquisitiveness to the poor decaying clamor of indecision and deception. Our secular culture deliberately challenges and ridicules all that was good, decent, and noble within our lives, and now we constantly have to assert what is sacred, what is essential.
How beautiful is the kingdom of God, which encourages goodness in the world, where all that which is divine waits, all love, all mercy, all forgiveness, all hope—a kingdom of charity, humility, obedience. How wonderful to live in peace, to live with God’s love for eternity!
We all have been tempted by the secular culture; we all have learned ways to resist it.
Our secular culture does not want our sincerity or our respect; it provides enough stimulation to make each of us a conversational diletante, with only trivial information and its derivatives to guide us away from seeking God’s forgiveness and mercy.
We must learn to pray to God in humble, honest, loving words. We must praise God for each breath we take, each mountain we see. We must thank God for the entirety of our lives, the good, the bad, the misspelled, the ungrammatical, the typographical errors, the beauty, his goodness and kindness to us. We must always thank God for all the priests, the clergy. For it is in our Church that Christ’s lessons of love continue to be shared, to be taught, to be lived every day.
The mission of the Church remains one of love, education, and preparation. The message of the Church is love.
“The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being . . . a defender of the rights of the poor . . . a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society . . . that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history.” Archbishop Oscar Romero
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