Mar 5 Wed
Me? … A saint?
To be a saint in this world is to develop to the full one's human potential.
The Lord continues to do "mad" things to this day. I am going to tell you something about them. If we happen to meet some day in the middle of this busy world ask me about the latest mad actions of this God who loves us. Then I will tell you everything He did, and you will love Him with me.
The mad things He did for you may inspire you to seek and find a true and worthy outlet for your loyal rebellion, for your anxious restlessness, for your legitimate unhappiness, for that holy dissatisfaction that you share with other sons of God.
Those who fled from God have now degenerated into a cold and bitter paganism. There are very few heretics left in the modern world. Those who abandon the one true God very soon become slaves of the most barren dryness of soul. They are simply pagans: and today they can be seen all around us straining their sightless eyes, vainly seeking that happiness for which their instincts cry out, groping about in the dark, blindly trying to find the way, the truth, and the life.
We try to help them. We have told them a thousand times to look to our Christ. They have tried to look, but they see nothing. We have shouted at them that Christ is alive, really alive, the same Man that He always was, and always will be, but the force of our arguments was quenched by their cold indifference.
And yet it is easy enough to understand this dryness and bitterness in the souls of these poor pagans when we read the cynical challenge in their eyes: "Show us by your lives that Christ is alive."
Their argument is all too just. We cannot expect them to be won over by treatises on apologetics and theology, some of them so dry and formal. Their argument is fair enough: "Show us by your lives that Christ is alive."
We look around us, among our fellow Christians of today, for lives to which we could point as examples and models for those men who have lost faith, and we are torn with grief when we cannot find them. It is a cause for bitter regret to see the insipid and crumbling spectacle we present to the world after twenty centuries of so-called progress.
Our world is full of living Christians, but yet it is the lifeless who are in command. We have churches in plenty, but so few good lives. All we lack is lives, lives to inspire these dead people, to convince them, to strengthen the wills of poor weak mortals, to enlighten the minds of the diseased, to soften the selfish hearts of greedy materialists — passionate lives, generous lives, lives ablaze with love. So few good lives!
Don’t you think that you and I are called to become the saints the world needs?
Urteaga
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