Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Friday 21 September 2007

That self-shaped hole in your self...

Fr R.R.,OMI had the seeds of a good column in the diocesan paper...
I find him, generally, kind of airy-fairy descriptively, and touchy-feely prescriptively; never getting down to anything beyond social-worker/psychologist platitudes.
Or rather never getting UP to anything beyond them, never to anything touching higher realms of the meanings of our human existence.
Certainly never informed by anything specifically Catholic, seldom anything distinctively Christian, and sometimes, it now seems, not even theist.
As I said, it began well, talking about the incessant distractions of pop culture, about how difficult the constant assault on our sense, our attention, make it to get in touch with.... and of course, it being a column by a priest, in a Catholic newspaper, wanna take a guess what it is that we need to be, and are but are too often thus prevented from being, in touch with?
That's right... "what's deepest inside of us and inside of others."
Yeah, that's the gaping hole in our lives we run the risk of never filling, by allowing ourselves to be inundated by all our culture and society has to offer... a failure to "make friend with that one part of us that will accompany us into the sunset."
Well, though, maybe there was a problem in editing and they accidentally left out the part where our insightful priestly columnist spares a word or two to mention... oh, I dunno, maybe God?
As printed, though, I suppose it would make a swell homily or sermon at a Mass where we sing from the "But Enough About Us, God, What Do YOU Think About Us?" Hymnal.


And instead of the Credo, we could all be given mirrors, and sing from How To Succeed in Business...

Or we could think about what Pascal said:What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.

2 comments:

Tom S. said...

Wonderful comment on a sad phenomenon. I have often said, and commented on, the fact that our Dioscean paper is more like the Journal of Social Work and Environmental Awareness than a Catholic paper.

I juat discovered your blog thim morning, via a link from Summorum Pontificum, and I like what you write. Thanks.

Scelata said...

Thank you for stopping by. God bless.

(save the Liturgy, Save the World)