OUR GENERATION’S PARTICULAR TASK
What is being asked of us today is that we find a new way to live out our faith within the affluence and sophistication of our culture.
Jesus tells us that we enter the kingdom of God more easily when we are poor, childlike, innocent, and helpless. We had those qualities in abundance before we became affluent, educated, and sophisticated, but we had them by conscription, not by choice. They came with our place in society. Moreover we had them prior to having affluence, education, wide experience, and acceptance within the mainstream. Our innocence was a first-innocence, our poverty a first-poverty, and our reliance on God was often dictated simply by our helplessness. Faith and faith communities work well when there's poverty, naiveté, innocence, and helplessness. They don't work nearly as well within affluence, sophistication, and self-reliance.
The task for us then, however difficult, is to become post-affluent, post-sophisticated, post-critical, and post-self-reliant. We need to become "inner immigrants", freely living out those qualities of poverty, innocence, and powerlessness that our economic, social, and educational status once forced on us.
Our generation's task is to learn what those things mean, en-flesh them, and then pattern them for our children and for others to follow
The above excerpt from a column by Ron Rolheiser addresses the title of my blog. To ponder then: how do we follow the directive to "Come as a child?" What would it look like for you? How would that feel?
