On Wednesday of last week the Archdiocese hosted a special Mass for Peace in the Middle East. Earlier that day a press conference was held, in which a number of Christians with roots in the Middle East, including Iraq, spoke about the terrible situation in their homelands and their own response to it. Speaker after speaker spoke movingly about the anguish they are experiencing at the suffering of family and friends. Particularly moving were the testimonies of Iraqi Christians, whose compatriots still living in Iraq are, together with other religious minorities, victims of unspeakable atrocities. One after the other they spoke of their resolve to respond to hatred with love and to vengeance with forgiveness. As I listened, I could not help but think, "These people get it! They understand, and they live, what it means to be a Christian!"
Can we say the same about ourselves? Is it time to go "back to school" to relearn what it really means to live the Christian life? The Scripture readings for last Sunday underscore just how radically different God's ways are from ours, and how it is easy to fall into the trap of becoming worldly and allowing human logic to guide our ways of thinking, acting, and living; how easy it is, in other words, to drift away from living our Christian faith authentically. This was behind the famous rebuke Jesus leveled at St. Peter: "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are thinking not as God does, but as humans do." (Matthew 16: 23) Since this is a temptation to which all of us can succumb - and there is great pressure upon us from all sides to do so - it is always good to heed the call of St.Paul, recalled in Sunday's second reading (cf. Romans 12:1-2), to be "transformed by the renewing of your minds." To be conformed to the world, to think only in terms of human reason and emotion, weakened by original sin, is to become - in the words of Pope Francis - "watered-down Christians" (Sunday Angelus message, Aug 31, 2014).
In truth, the Christian must always be "in school", since conversion to our Lord and ever deeper immersion in his ways is a life-long process. We are always learning. It is sad when children drop out of school, because we know the missed opportunities this represents. Have we dropped out of the school of Christian life? If so, it is time to go back and learn once again from Sacred Scripture and the Christian Tradition the joy of being in a living relationship with Jesus Christ in the communion of his Church.
