{"id":24528,"date":"2009-04-11T13:30:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-11T17:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/2009\/04\/a-gloomy-holy-saturday-the-cou\/"},"modified":"2009-04-11T13:30:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-11T17:30:00","slug":"a-gloomy-holy-saturday-the-cou","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/2009\/04\/a-gloomy-holy-saturday-the-cou\/","title":{"rendered":"A gloomy Holy Saturday: the courseness of humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The gloominess of today&#8217;s weather leads to a gloomy feeling that all is not well in the world. Of course, it is Holy Saturday which in itself is a bittersweet experience: the Paschal Mystery is intense and the drama of the sacred Liturgy causes me to reflect more deeply on important matters: human desire, cooperation with truth, faithfulness, interior and exterior peace, love, salvation, God, Chris&#8217;t atonement, etc.<\/p>\n<p>The spiritual intensity of the day has led me to think of how some cultural commentators&nbsp;are looking at life through the lens of Christian faith seeing a dismal experience of Christianity and the reduction of man and woman to the courseness of existence. I am beginning to see that we are living&nbsp;a dark period of history.&nbsp;Let me give three examples that depress me, all come from today&#8217;s edition of the <i>New York Times<\/i>: &#8220;Washington Churches Eye a Prize: The Obamas,&#8221; &#8220;In Another Recession Sign, an Uptick in Vasectomies&#8221; and &#8220;Spain Steps Into Battle With Itself on Abortion.&#8221; For me, these articles show to what extent that many people are willing to go to reduce the experience of faith to a commodity, life to a matter of &#8220;rights and progressivity&#8221; and the sexual intercourse to economy and self-centeredness. All three&nbsp;articles strike me as examples of desperation because know of them really demonstrate to me that following Christ (or any religious sensibility)&nbsp;means anything.&nbsp;Has truth, the dignity of human life and a healthy sexuality been totally replaced by radical subjectivity, nihilism and hedonism?<\/p>\n<p>The Spanish interlocutors make the claim of trying to change the current abortion law as a matter of humanity suggesting that not to change the law is to live in a barbourous society. It&#8217;s quite the opposite: you&#8217;re humanity is diminished by acting selfishly and cruelly toward the unborn. How is killing the unborn giving a woman a dignified humanity when abortion is part of the matrix? The abortion proponents argue that they want a state that is &#8220;progressive,&#8221; like other Western nations except Ireland. To what are they progressing? Death? A culture where death is the hallmark and not life.<\/p>\n<p>On Holy Saturday I have to say that our society is&nbsp;leaping toward madness and not to great freedom and certainly not toward communion with God and life with Him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The gloominess of today&#8217;s weather leads to a gloomy feeling that all is not well in the world. Of course, it is Holy Saturday which in itself is a bittersweet experience: the Paschal Mystery is intense and the drama of the sacred Liturgy causes me to reflect more deeply on important matters: human desire, cooperation &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/2009\/04\/a-gloomy-holy-saturday-the-cou\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">A gloomy Holy Saturday: the courseness of humanity<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,30],"tags":[1778,1900],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}