What it means to be Christian
Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2015 7:11 am
This passage from a post by John Wright is truly inspirational:
When I read this I found myself saying, "Yes, that's it right there ".One of the things that most delights me, aside from eternal life and infinite bliss, in becoming a Christian is my recovery of a sense of the texture of time.
Catholics see the world in an additional dimension which the flat vision of the one-eyed skeptic cannot see, nor even imagine: for us, bread is not merely bread, but divine flesh immaculate, the manna of angels; water is not merely water, but the promise of John the Baptist, the salvation of Noah, the dryshod pathway of Moses out of bondage; and fire is not merely fire; marriage is not merely a contract for the exchange of sexual services or living arrangements, but the very image of the covenant of salvation, and the wedding feast of God to His bride the Church: and so for all trees, beasts, birds, stars, and things both humble and grand.
Being a Christian is like living inside a poem, where every word carries a freight of meaning, or walking in procession inside some great palace of gold and marble richly adorned with statue and fresco, mosaic and stained glass, so that the pillars are caryatids of ancestral queens, the door panels are carved with historic scenes, the tapestries are prophecies, and even the gargoyles of the drainpipes grin, and everything was meant to carry a sign to the eye.
The modern mind is dyslexic and sociopathic toward nature, and sees nothing but dead gibberish, disproportion, distortion, aberration. At the feast table of the five senses nature lays before us, the modern men taste only straw.
When it comes to the calendar, likewise, the times and seasons are not merely chemical changes in flora and fauna correlative to astronomical motions, but rich in history, message, and meaning. I was bemused to learn that the workingmen in the so called Dark Ages had more feast days and more time off than we moderns. Instead of fretting about diets year round, and making a nuisance of themselves at Thanksgiving feasts, men of former ages would fast during fast days and feast during feast days, and many things which by right should not pass out of memory on those days they would recall, which the modern generation, addicted to distraction, makes haste to forget.