Your life and my life

After receiving the Blessed Sacrament this morning, my daughter grabbed my first finger just she had as a baby. She held on so tight with grim determination to never let go. In fact as babies all my children did this for the first few months. Their first way of communicating faith and trust in me and my husband. They knew even then that we loved them and would protect them no matter what. We needed no one to tell us, we just knew we were responsible for this tiny defenceless life. When you conceive a child you feel instantly a surge of love and responsibility of the likes you have never felt before. It is perhaps the first sense you have that life is a valuable, precious and irreplaceable gift from God.

Once we have the value of life revealed to us, we begin to understand the sheer burden of responsibility we have. For it is not just this precious bundle of joy we are responsible for. As Christians we are responsible for the respect and upholding of all life. Different to that unique and ultimate bond we have for our children, it requires us to give of ourselves none the less. God came down to us on Earth and demonstrated once and for all, the value of life and the responsibility we have for it. The actions of humans caused his death, yet he sacrificed everything in order to show us the totality of his love and forgiveness to us.

Everything on this planet has been given to us from God. Each and every life from the tiniest insect to the largest living thing on earth. We should not need to be told to respect them. Governments should not need to force us to help them. It should come to us as a second nature. Sacrifice of ourselves and our comfort for the sake of others is meant to be the point of our faith. We are meant to love one another as he has loved us. When someone knocks on our door, we are meant to welcome in whoever stands there waiting.

We have become so self orientated that I think very often we lose our way slightly. We are surrounded by the message self is more important. How we feel, what we think is right, what we want is more important than the good of the many. Our lives have ceased to be God centred. Life centred. Truth Centred. It is ME centred.

If ME is all we are responsible for and ME is all we look after, then we disorder the delicate environment around us. We destroy communities, we destroy ecosystems and we corrupt the planet with our own self centred greed and we leave nothing for our children and their children's children. It will be gone.

It frightens me sometimes, that the very life I feel so defensive of  faces a very different life to the one I had, as does their children. We have a responsibility to live a Christ like life on this planet. If we are to truly honour our baptismal and confirmation vows, it is an essential part of our lives to sacrifice some of what we have and who we are to protect and nurture the valuable gift of creation God has given us. Each life as valuable as the one before it. Every life is someone's child, someone's flesh and blood and is as valuable as you and me.

Taking it Slow

I know I have not said much recently but I have been taking it slow. SLOW, I hear you say. Yes I have been very slow and this has not left me with more free time but less. This is because taking it slow has not meant sitting around. I have been taking the time to remove the convenience from my daily tasks.I have been making my own pasta,bread,  detergents and cosmetics. It has only by going back to these basics and learning what goes into my food and detergents that I have begun to realise the sheer amount of chemicals we heap into our bodies on a daily basis without even thinking about it and sometimes without even knowing. We are so eager to find the most convenient way of getting what we want, at the lowest price possible, we do not stop to think about the consequences for our own health, the planet or the other living creatures on it.

We have a habit of doing the same with the our faith. We constantly seek to make Church convenient, shorter and more relevant.  The Church has sought out Fresh Expressions of our faith diluting the Gospel and in some cases ignoring the sacraments entirely. We have diluted what should be central to our faith so much that many people do not understand what should be central to their faith. When you teach people shallow meaningless faith, you will only get a crowd of people who will stay as long as they want to consume your product. When your product ends or changes they leave. Their presence is not based on a faith in Christ or his teachings but on a shallow gimmick. When the gimmick ceases to be useful or changes into something they do not want they leave.

As a Church we need to look back at what should be central to our faith, return to putting Christ at the centre of our faith, mission and evangelism. It is only by spending time encountering Christ, learning the truths of our faith and by sharing them with others. Inviting them to join in our weekly meal, teaching them it's significance, allowing them time and space to encounter his love. This slow steady way of revealing Christ through our actions and his presence is the only sure way of growing the Church in any long time way. Christ is as relevant today as he was 2,000 years ago, he is present in our lives through the sacraments. He has not abandoned us, I only hope we do not abandon him.