Seasons of Change

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October 1, 2020 | Fr. Michael Brunner O.S.B.

It is now officially Fall or autumn. Take your pick. Either way, the sun is definitely on the downhill slide. Halloween stuff began appearing in the stores right after Labor Day and a few Christmas things are popping up already. I used to get a feeling of dread this time of year, knowing that winter was just around the corner. After 70 years, I’ve gotten used to winter, although I haven’t gotten to like it. Eventually, a sensible person accepts the inevitable. I remember my father, somewhere around the age of 70, announcing with irony, “Your mother and I are now in our ‘Golden Years.’” There is some of that irony in autumn. The trees will become colorful for a couple of weeks and then become skeletons, for a season.

Life is a progression of seasons. And so is our spiritual life. The environment in which we live changes, and we must change with it. Saint Paul says “When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things” (1 Cor 13:11). For many of us, the truths we learned as children, expressed in simple ways and in simple stories, seem attacked or challenged by the expanding body of truth we call science. It need not be. If God created by means of the Big Bang and used evolution to produce the magnificent variety of life, that does not lessen His Lordship, power or glory. Likewise, the requirements of our time, place, society, and culture change as creation develops. Human sacrifice and child sacrifice are no longer problems. Neither is slavery. We have lots of other problems, however, which keep changing.

Today, Pope Francis says, the Church must find a new balance. He recently said in an interview that the Church needs to adjust to the present season by moving beyond its negative focus on issues like abortion and contraception. If you are not a member of the Church, you get a very jaundiced view of us by the constant barrage of anti and negative messages all about what the Church is against. Nobody wants to be around or belong to a people who seem to be against everything, who are always critical and warning about danger. So what if they are right – nobody listens. Just look at what happened to the Prophet Jeremiah.

There is so much more to the Church than what we are against. One of the earliest heresies the Church came up against was a collection of beliefs called Gnosticism. The root of Gnosticism was (and still is) that material things, the stuff of this world, are evil, bad. The only good is in the realm of the spiritual. The Church rejects this. The Bible says, “God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good” (Gen 1:31). Just so, sex is a good thing. It is nothing new that it gets abused and misused. That has been and always will be a problem and the Church has and always will take a stand against abuses. But I don’t think that was or is the purpose for which Jesus founded the Church. Rather Jesus, who ate and associated with sinners, founded this Church to continue His work and mission of salvation: “the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them. And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me” (Mt 11:4). Constant messages focusing on what is wrong today do a disservice to Jesus himself, and make Him look offensive, judgmental and unappealing. After all, it was Jesus who first said, “Do not judge” (Mt 7:1). And to the woman caught in adultery, “Neither do I condemn you” (Jn 8:11).  If we read the Gospels, we see and hear Jesus preaching a positive message about God’s kingdom and what God offers. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (Jn 3:17).

We are all sinners, whatever the season. Our sins as children are generally different from our sins as teenagers or adults.
Adults and teenagers sinners need to hear how Jesus has saved them, and how the Church can minister to them as Jesus did to the sinners of His time. That is great news, good news, for all of us.