To the editor:
Sometimes it is easy to grow weary as we battle for the rights of unborn children, the elderly, the handicapped, and to defend the institution of marriage in a culture that advocates for abortion rights, euthanasia, and same sex marriage.
We need to focus on the words of St. Paul to the Christian community at Galatia, “Let us not grow tired of doing good, for in due time we shall reap our harvest, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6: 9).
Though the media, Hollywood, our government and its judicial system, and other cultural elites, including our current president, continue their assault on the very dignity of human life and the true meaning of marriage, we must not give up.
In 1837, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister and the editor of an anti-slavery newspaper, was murdered by an angry mob of slavery supporters in Alton, Ill. Just five days before his death he gave a defense of his anti-slavery sentiments, “It is not true, as has been charged upon me, that I hold in contempt the feelings and sentiments of this community, in reference to the question which is now agitating it. I respect and appreciate the feelings and opinions of my fellow-citizens and it is one of the most painful and unpleasant duties of my life, that I am called upon to act in opposition to them. . . .
“I am impelled to the course I have taken, because I fear God. As I shall answer it to my God in the great day, I dare not abandon my sentiments, or cease in all proper ways to propagate them.” (Michael Coren, Heresy, 2012, pp 146 and 147).
We must work, pray, lobby to defend and protect all life from conception until natural death and the institution of marriage as one man and one woman. How can we do this in a culture that appears to be antagonistic to those with strong Christian faith?
Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist, recently wrote a book titled Bad Religion and had some advice in how to improve our religious faith here in America, “The future of American religion depends on believers who can demonstrate, in word and deed alike, that the possibilities of the Christian life are not exhausted by TV preachers and self-help gurus, utopians, and demagogues.
“It depends on public examples of holiness and public demonstrations of what the imitation of Christ can mean for a fallen world. We are waiting, not for another political savior or television personality, but for a Dominic or a Francis, an Ignatius or a Wesley, a Wilberforce or a Newman, a Bonhoeffer or a Solzhenitsyn . . . . Anyone who would save their country should look first to save themselves. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
The last sentence is taken from Matthew 6:33. Good advice indeed. We know that Christ has won the prize for us but we must do our part by seeking holiness in all we do.
Patrick Hardyman, Blanchardville