Freedom through service
Joy through solidarity
Not sad, high-minded men with a handful of high-minded, bleak ideals, but citizens of a world whose heart is love. We know in the way of Jesus, not a law, but a liberation into true humanity; the power to love, to belong to one another, to start again when things go wrong, to be grateful, to adore.
Every one of us, every human being, confronts at some time the collapse of meaning and direction in our lives – in anxiety, in illness, in unemployment or broken relationships, in all the forces that frustrate and diminish us as persons, and, at the last, in our own deaths. The Church has no pat answers to the dilemmas of existence, only a witness to what she knows. That under the mercy of God our perplexities, our failures, our betrayals, our limitations, can open into new freedoms, if we follow the way of Jesus. A century and a half ago, Coleridge wrote: ‘Christianity is not a theory, or a speculation, but a Life; not a philosophy of life, but a Life, and a living process . . . Try it.’ I don’t know how to better that advice; like Coleridge, I have found life in the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, like millions of others in every age, like the psalmist before us:
I love the Lord, for he has heard the cry of my appeal. For he turned his ear to me in the day when I called him. They surrounded me, the snares of death, with the anguish of the tomb: They caught me, sorrow and distress: I called on the Lord’s name . . . Turn back, my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has been good. He has kept my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from stumbling. I will walk in the presence of the Lord, in the land of the living. (Psalm 114)