An Unworthy Ode. . .

I read on Facebook An Ode to Postmodern Catholic Apologists.  It is not difficult to know the author's sentiments as they have been well expressed, although what is written is sad and mistaken.  But you be the judge.

Enough on Tolkien and Lewis,

Enough images from the Renaissance,
Enough Tridentine nostalgia,
Enough neo-Neo-Scholasticism,
And pious Romanticism.
I do not trust an ethos of retrieval.
We need new forms, brothers and sisters,
New ways to show how culture is made ever new,
From the most authentic of sources.
How me how the Church is relevant in the present,
Not what is significant about the past.
Show me how Christ breathes life
Into the wheel of the year
And the works of human hands,
How his beauty inheres the universe,
How wisdom fills all space
And how the Spirit dissolves time
Through the kairotic disruption of the now.
Let all else die.
For we live by the resurrection. 

 

I will admit that the writing is well-done but what it says is, well, trivial and foolish, unworthy of the talent of the writer.  As tired as he might be of those who listen to the faithful voices of the past, the rest of us are tired of the infatuation with the moment that has literally driven the faithful from their refuge of faith and hope and turned an unbelieving world against even curiosity about the faith.  Look at Rome and those who cry out for a relevant Church instead of reverent one.  Have they filled the empty pews or only contributed to the migration away from those pews?  What about those in other church bodies?  Have the voices who cry out for an accommodation with culture, with the views of those who have turned their back upon the faith, and for all things to be made new helped any church to grow?

There is little use of polls that tell us of what our people do not believe -- except to call to repentance those who were charged with their catechesis!  There is little benefit to critics who tires of the faithfulness of those who went before because they are full of themselves.  There will be no renewal which eschews the wisdom of the fathers and there will be no revitalization from an appetite only for things new. And there will be no future for a Church which abhors her grandparents.  What do you make of words, no matter how well written, that challenge the yesterday, today, and forever Jesus or who think God to have the same ADD that their author does?  I am tired of such fancy and wonder why the authors appear to be so threatened by those who value the witness of tradition.

 

On this Holy Cross Day, now is not the time to retreat from the legacy of the saints but to embrace it and to pray that their faithfulness would be our inspiration to face the challenges of the day and the promise of the future with the same hope and steadfastness that marked those who went before.