Picking up the Thread and Carrying the Task Forward

God or Nothing

Sarah, Cardinal Robert; Diat, Nicolas

(2015-08-31).  Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.

"Here are the words of Pope John at the opening of Vatican Council II: “The serious problems confronting the world after almost two thousand years remain unchanged. Jesus Christ is ever resplendent as the center of history and of life. Men are either with Him and His Church, and then they enjoy light, goodness, order, and peace. Or else they are without Him, or against Him, and deliberately opposed to His Church, and then they experience confusion, bitterness in human relations, and the danger of fratricidal wars.” From the start of Vatican II, although concerned about aggiornamento, the renewal of the Church, and the reunion of Christians, the pope had strongly emphasized that the Council’s chief task was to reveal God to the world, to defend and promote doctrine. That is why the Church, while rejoicing in the admirable inventions of human genius and in the progress of science and technology, had to remind mankind that beyond the visible aspect of things the primordial duty remains to turn to God. For John XXIII, the Council was first of all an encounter with God in prayer, with Mary, like the apostles in the upper room on the eve of Pentecost." (Kindle Locations 1656-1664). 

One of the things children used to learn, that experience which marked their coming of age, their adulthood, was reverence for parents, not because we recognized them as having something over on us, but because we understood that they had learned life's lessons and stood noble and tall in the midst of all that could not be explained except by closeness to the Almighty. Suffering and deprivation not so much embraced in and of themselves but met and faced in company with Jesus Crucified and Glorified.

Nicolas Diat does a great job in an interview book of giving us access to Cardinal Robert Sarah as an elder, as a father in faith.

I'll say no more but encourage you to read and enjoy. This might be the book which helps you to come humbly home to the tradition and stop kicking at the goad. This might be the book that shames you for your modernism or iconoclasm to place you at the feet of God's little ones, great in His eyes and light to the world.

You may think you know some things better than the Cardinal, but in this world, God's world, it is long since time for you to recover reverence for the immediacy of experience in Christ's presence, for the prayerfulness which bows the head and bends the knee.