Living the Catholic Faith - Charles J. Chaput O.F.M. Cap.

Living the Catholic Faith (eBook)

Rediscovering the Basics

Charles J. Chaput O.F.M. Cap. (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Servant (Verlag)
978-1-63582-363-9 (ISBN)

Addressing the difficult question of what it means to be a Catholic in the twenty-first century, Archbishop Charles Chaput offers a sound, contemporary vision for understanding the teachings of the Church and shows how you live them out with a spirit of love and obedience. How can you experience a fresh, active spiritual life? Find out as you rediscover the vital basics of Living the Catholic Faith.

CHAPTER ONE

Becoming a Christian

Have you ever been to Niagara Falls? If not, try to imagine them. If you have, close your eyes and remember. What’s the most overwhelming thing about Niagara Falls?

It’s the sound. You can hear the Falls from miles away. At first, the noise is just a steady background rumble. Yet it builds and builds until, at the brink, the thunder can almost paralyze. At the brink, the ground vibrates. For anyone gazing out across the curtain of white and turbulent water, the Falls are a lesson in humility. Human beings have done amazing things in our lifetime. But the Falls are God’s architecture—God’s engineering—cut right into the raw granite of the earth. All the water in Lakes Superior, Huron, Michigan, and Erie sooner or later goes over the edge. That’s a lot of water. It’s cold, fast, and powerful, and it doesn’t care what—or who—it takes with it.

People have been going over the Falls for a long time. Some intend to, and some don’t. The people who deliberately shoot the Falls build very strong barrels or cylinders to protect themselves from the rocks, the water, and the impact of falling 163 feet. To have any chance of surviving, they need to hit exactly the right channel in the current. That channel needs to drop them exactly into the one small pool at the base of the Canadian Falls that has no rocks. And then they have to be lucky enough to avoid getting trapped behind the wall of falling water, or they’ll run out of air. Even under the best circumstances, with the best preparation, it’s a very risky stunt, which is why it’s also illegal. In other words, the Falls are very beautiful and very dangerous at the same time. This leads to my story.

It happened maybe forty years ago. An uncle took his young niece and nephew out on the Niagara River in his powerboat, a few miles above the Falls. This is common in the summer, because the current is fairly gentle at that point and the Coast Guard patrols the area. This time the engine failed. The man didn’t have a radio. The Coast Guard didn’t spot him until the boat was already in the grip of the river. Hundreds of people saw what was happening. They ran to the shore, but of course they couldn’t help. The man had only two life jackets. He gave them to the children. A few hundred yards above the brink, the boat hit a rock and overturned. The uncle disappeared in the water. The boy was swept over the edge but, purely by God’s grace, he hit just the right channel. That channel dropped him at the only possible place—at exactly the right angle and speed—so he could survive the plunge. He is still the only person to go over Niagara Falls unprotected, and live.

Yet my story really concerns the young girl. She was trapped in a different channel and banged around on the rocks. Then she shot toward the brink like a bullet, just beyond the reach of the crowd. That should have been the end of her, except that twenty yards from the brink, a man jumped into the river. While he held on to a friend with one hand, he grabbed the girl with his other hand, just as she swept past. Then he hung on to her until the people on the bank could pull them both to safety. The water at that point is chest-deep, moving very fast, and ice-cold. The riverbed is as slippery as greased glass. But he did it anyway, and he saved her life.

Now that’s a true story. And if you want a hint of what “becoming a Christian” is about, and why it’s important, there’s no better place to start. Each of us is that girl. We’re all swept along, beaten up, and paralyzed by a river of sin—our own sins, and the world’s sinfulness, flowing down all the way from Adam and Eve. It’s the river we call original sin. In the grip of that river, we can see our own deaths just over the brink. Yet no matter how strong a swimmer we may be, no matter how hard we may struggle, we can’t do anything about it on our own. We can’t save ourselves. Then a Savior jumps into the current, for no reason other than wanting to rescue us. And He pulls us to safety.

That’s the nature of Baptism. Becoming a Christian begins in Baptism, with God intervening to save us. It’s His free gift and His initiative. That’s why Baptism is not just a pious family social event. It’s literally a matter of life and death. Eternity hinges on it. Jesus said, unless a man be “born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (Jn 3:5). The reason is simple. We’re born loved by God, but also estranged from Him. We’re born into that river of sin, and we are part of it. In Baptism, God pulls us out of the river and saves us from the ruin that lies just over the brink.

“Sin” is a bad word these days. Not because we don’t believe in it, but because we don’t want to believe in it. We live in an age when we spend billions of dollars every year delaying death, denying age, and explaining away sin. Yet we can’t evade any of these things. Something’s wrong with the fabric of our lives, and we can all instinctively sense it. There’s a dissonance in our own hearts, and a disharmony in the world around us, that psychology and affluence can’t fix.

It’s what the poet William Butler Yeats meant—without intending it—when he wrote that, “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” God is the glue to human meaning. When we turn away from Him in sin, the center cannot hold because the glue is gone. The result is suffering. History may have seen unhappier times, but the twentieth century was surely bloody enough for any generation, and the wounds are everywhere. You may have heard the music of Don Henley. He has a strange and arresting song on one of his albums called The Garden of Allah. In it, the devil comes to modern Los Angeles to do his wicked work. Yet in the course of the song, the devil discovers that the city reminds him too much of home. All his work is already done, so he leaves, disappointed by his own success.

Sin is real, and not only in Los Angeles, but in each city, home, and heart. It leads to division and death. We can deny it only by living a kind of schizophrenia, which is exactly what our culture is trying to do. I doubt that I need to convince you of that. You can see for yourself, just by surfing your television channels or skimming the daily newspaper headlines. If Baptism isn’t equally real—if it’s just a nice metaphor or a Church word for dealing with the flaws in our gene code; if it doesn’t truly deliver us from sin—then our faith is worthless, and we have better things to do than delude ourselves.

The power of Baptism is real. The delusion in our world isn’t faith, but the lack of it. Convincing ourselves that we’re not really in the river won’t suspend gravity when we go over the falls. We find the proof of Baptism’s power not just in the revealed Word of God but in the sacrament’s effect on individuals, and on the life of the believing community. Despite all of our own mistakes, and all of the world’s persecution, the faith still lives and grows. Holiness happens. Saints happen. Where evil exists, grace abounds more so, if we just have the eyes to see it. Baptism plants a very tenacious seed, which is cultivated to full life by the Church.

This brings me back to the little girl rescued from the Niagara River. Two things happened to that girl. The first is obvious. She was saved from death. Yet there’s more. She was also delivered into a new life, a life she had no reason to expect, and which was changed permanently by her brush with death. The similarity to Baptism is this: Baptism not only delivers us from death, it also delivers us into a new life, into a “community of life”—the Church. The Church grows, nourishes, reinforces, and deepens our relationship with God, the Author of life itself. Being saved from death is a pretty good deal. Yet, in a sense, the really interesting part, the really important part, is what we do with life afterward.

God has an opinion about that. He saves us for a purpose. That purpose is love. He loves each of us infinitely and ardently, as a bridegroom loves his bride. He loves us enough to share with us the mission of His Son, Jesus, the task of redeeming and sanctifying the world, and drawing all souls into His friendship. That’s why Christian love is never a passive verb. It’s always active.

Of course, before we act on God’s love, we first must receive it and allow it to transform us. As Mary shows us, “let it be done unto me” comes before “let me do it.” Yet, having received the gift of faith in Baptism, we can then respond to Jesus Christ when He sends us to “make disciples of all nations,” just as He Himself was sent by His Father. Baptism always implies two things: communion in and with the Church; and mission to the world. This means that each of us is a missionary, and we need to act like it.

Becoming a Christian is never merely an act of loyalty to an institution, or agreeing with a body of doctrines. Of course, these things are very important. Vatican II reminded Catholics that no distinction can exist between the so-called institutional Church and the body of Christ. We can’t claim to be part of the People of God, but separate ourselves from the structures of authority in the Church. Church...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	17.1.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
ISBN-10	1-63582-363-3 / 1635823633
ISBN-13	978-1-63582-363-9 / 9781635823639

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