Catholic and Enjoying It!
Bishop Robert Barron on the historic nature of the Christian faith and the insistence that history is ultimately His story: the outworking of the purposes of God in the vast drama and tangle of human history.
It is a particularly challenging thing to believe, particularly in an era of history in which Christians, who are supposed to be apostles of Christ and emissaries of the inbreaking of the Incarnate God into human affairs, present such a massively unedifying spectacle.
Padre Pio, I think it was, likens human history to an embroidery. We see the back side with all the weird loose threads and seeming messiness in this life (Paul’s image was “through a glass darkly”). It will only be in the eschaton that we see the other side and understand what work of art God is truly accomplishing (seeing him face to face, in Paul’s words). I like that and find it deeply consoling.
I believe in one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church because Jesus says it is his, that he founded it, that he guides, sustains, feeds, and protects it. I do not and never have believed in it because its members are so wonderful, courageous, bright, holy, loving or good. Sometimes they are and its beautiful. Sometimes they wring and break my heart or drive me mad with their blind stupidity. But since Christ loves me while I am a selfish, blind, jackass then I had better do the same for all his other followers when they hurt me, lest he measure to me what I measure to others.
Please forgive me my many failings for Christ’s sake.
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