Hope for Unity

I said in my last post I would blog on Sunday mornings and write about some of the things I was thinking about putting in the book I am writing. But I remember my husband saying a long time ago that it is better not to talk too much about your writing--just write or it won't get done. I will try to take his advice, but that leaves other topics I am not putting in my book, at least for the time being.

I said I would talk about things that make me angry. After thinking about it, I realized that was not probably a good way of putting it, so I'm not waiting for Sunday to type a correction. The word "angry" itself starts a feeling of alienation which is the opposite of what I want to do. I want to help others see the love and truth of God, and the non-believing world is often skeptical about Christ because of the bad behavior of Christians. It seems it is not a good approach to tell them all they are doing wrong, or at least telling them in an aggressive way. I realize Christians can't completely overlook what we think is sinful, but we can try to be consistently loving. This will of course be a challenge for me, and I assume is for most of us.

John Paul II among others have said it is not only necessary to evangelize, but to re-evangelize. This means we need to help Catholics and other Christians to regain the zeal for Christ. Then there is the case of people who are very zealous about religion but have different ideas of it than we do. Therefore, there are many different kinds of people out there we should reach out to for a meeting of minds. Many of us would love to see Christian unity. To my surprise, I found Pope Benedict XVI just began the annual week for prayer for Christian Unity (2019 Update: link to news story no longer accessible).

It's amazing how emotional we can get when we simply disagree with someone. They might not be physically threatening, yet their thinking in a certain way sets us off. But perhaps we perceive they do threaten us in our livelihoods, as in class struggles, or personal freedom, as in certain Church laws. I've talked about my thoughts on God's creative power, and I would like to cover other things as well. Though I don't like to argue, believe it or not, I think we should deal with diverse controversial topics such as evolution, contraception and women's' ordination. With all these subjects, I'd much rather discuss and try to get to the best answer than to be disdained or feel the same against someone else. We don't want the disagreements splitting us apart. Perhaps it is naive to hope for resolutions, but isn't that what all our writing and speaking is about? We express our views and I hope listen to others.

We have our work ahead of us to understand as well as promote Christianity. I will pray and continually try to increase my love of Christ and fellow humans within myself.