Christopher Laurence Examines – Through the Message, All is Made Good

Christopher Laurence Examines – Through the Message, All is Made Good

Nearly all of modern life is an affliction. Either we struggle, like the salmon pushing upstream, against the cool water’s flow of life ordered by The Lord; or we embrace Christ, which comes with the Cross, and thereby all of modernity afflicts us in turn. Modern conveniences, hypnotically named so as to sway us to be convinced of their necessity, impose their burdens of ownership, making promises in smooth metal and curve-formed plastic. Yet there is a deep haunting of soul which howls for those things only the transcendent can supply. The red dirt, clay and coal; the clear water running off the mountain peaks, and the brackish swamps which obscure your body from sight below the knee – gator-laden and perilous; the needle-sharp green of the Eastern white pine, and the foreboding and portentous hunch of the Louisiana cypress – all connect ethereally to the Heavens, where sits their Creator.

These are the things which are near-everlasting, or as perpetual at least as the Earth itself, until it and all its goods are consumed in flame. Of nature and natural order are the things we should strive to own and live among, and allow them to point us – by line of sight, train of thought, motion of will – to the Divine and Eternal in Our Lord and the great Cloud of Witnesses surrounding Him.

But are all worldly things impedimenta? Refuse, dregs and dross to be discarded? No. For no thing in itself is evil. It is the misuse, or inordinate desire for, or disordered pursuit of things which makes engagement with them occasion of sin, through our perversion and distortion of their proper ends. We can engage with the modern culture, with banal arts and media, baptize and transfigure it to our own ends; suffuse it with right order and virtue. And in this way we make it another tool with which to point those immersed in it to the Truth. The Church is the culture. Though one has slipped from the grasp of the other, we can reclaim pockets of it. As Saint Paul’s message went out, powerfully, from within the prisons of Rome, so can we sing it from within the confines of a hateful culture.