A New Beginning

Every life begins with great promise.  How this promise grows depends on our willingness to accept the challenge of grace in all its tragedy, comedy and unique wonder.

Every person knows what fearful destiny waits us; namely death.  Nevertheless, in the final analysis of being a creature deserving of God’s love, such a gift of life can be defended only if the individual has more to offer than life has; if one is able to plead a meaning that is stronger than death, than the unknown horrors that await us and turn that promise into a curse.

The single most significant point for Western Christian Humanism is this:  Anticipatory (unasked) gifts are inevitable; they present themselves in one form or another along with the gift of life.  This is lost in our current age where control seems to dominate.             We strive to remember that life itself is uniquely designed for such unasked gifts in both heredity and milieu.  The entire corpus of Dostoyevsky wrestles with the complete rejection of anticipatory spiritual gifts, with grave consequences.

Given the inevitability of grace, their can only be one question:  Which gifts are defensible in view of the freedom, dignity and inalienable right of being human?

The answer is simple:  those gifts that are least likely to treat the future as something foreign, gifts that fortify courage in opening freedom to itself; in a sentence:  Gifts that make man human.

The believing Christian is convinced that optimal and consequently inwardly binding grace is the way of faith!  The Church is acknowledged to be that historical context, that ‘milieu’ in which humanness  is truly made free.

This blog is undertaken in the spirit that the gift of self to Him Crucified and Risen reveals meaning that is alone capable of withstanding the fate of an unknown future.