…we are called to be Church in, to, and for the world; to the culture, and the society in which we find ourselves.

This does not mean that we have to reject everything about our modern culture.  It does mean that we have to look at it critically, and unmask the reality of the way we live, and in particular, how the way we live has consequence for others.  Arise Together in Christ.  Season 3: In the Footsteps of Christ.

No Man is an Island

“The Church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all.  When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for the child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member.  And when she buries a man, that action concerns me; for all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.  God employs several translators; some lives are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some lives by justice, but God’s hand is in every translation, and His hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall open to one another…..

No man is an island, entire of himself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manner of thy friend’s or of thine own family were.  Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”  —John Donne (1572-1631) from Meditations XVII taken from the Arise booklet quoted above.