ST. GABRIEL POSSENTI AND THE SANCTITY OF FIGHTING Nathan Stone
Familiarity breeds contempt, according to the old saying. Outside that, familiarity breeds something worse— complacency. Part of my own personal theory as to why Christianity has suffered a reversal of fortunes in the 20th and 21st centuries is because one of the central cores of the faith—the Scriptures—has become old hat. The commands to love your neighbor as yourself and to pluck out your own eye if it causes you to sin with the declarations that prostitutes and tax collectors (the lowest of the low for Jews of the 1st century) were entering the Kingdom of God before the Pharisees were bundles of lit dynamite when Christ uttered them; they were landmines when they were recorded by the evangelists and repeated to the early Christians in the catacombs; and they were sharpened pikes to the Christians who heard and read them after Constantine and Theodosius. Today, two thousand years later, they have become as familiar as and as boring as a sunrise. A few words into the readings and our minds usually switch to autopilot after we recognize which verbal
Artwork: The Archangel Michael Defeating Satan by Guido Reni, 1635
pattern is being repeated to us. It’s all very bloodless and respectable. And the familiarity has spread beyond the message to the Messenger, a logical result when the Word is the Message. G.K. Chesterton famously (and accurately) described orthodoxy as a boulder balanced on its tip; if pushed too much in any direction, the whole thing was bound to collapse. The same thing has happened to Christ. The proclamation of being the Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God have swallowed up entirely His being the Lion of Judah; the Prince of Peace Who came not to bring peace but the sword. It is telling that we are more familiar with iconography of Christ carrying a lamb on His shoulders than we are of Him with a sword issuing from His mouth. And in an age awash in moral therapeutic deism, it was predictable that the over saturation of Christ as Good Shepherd—gentle, peaceful—would devolve into saccharine depictions of “Jesus is my homie.” This is why only fragments of Scripture that still have some power to jostle us out of that autopilot setting
Fellowship & Fairydust
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