A Passing Thought: Generational Catholic Church - The Generation

As each successive generation seems to be more affluent that the last, if not determined by income and wealth, then certainly measured by the ways by which life is lived. Technology has helped to improve efficiency, allowing man to replace a life consumed by menial tasks with one addicted to gadgetries and social media.  The obsession with coming out with the newest on the production side and with owning the latest on the consumption side have replaced man's ponderous moments, asking questions that capture the depth of man's imagination.  Today's curiosities seem to be about what is possible rather than what could be, in that everything that is done seems to be always for more convenience for the self but not for the true betterment of man and his environment.  Time is spent more on what is inevitable as society progresses technologically rather than on what is possible.  The focus is on "me" and on the "now that is the world"; not on "who I could be" and not on the "world tomorrow that could bring a smile to everyone's face." It is the turning of man's eyes upon himself that turns man's eyes away from God.  Man has become his own god; his creations have become his own heaven.  His realities are the riches the world can provide, forgetting Who had created the earth and the universe in which it suspends, forgetting that true richness is with God in Heaven, and only in man's sweetest dreams that have been so elusive for this self-centered, self-obsessed, technology-awed, reality-driven generation can man experience a glimpse of Heaven. Without imagining God's Eden as it was created, Eden will never be restored, and as it is continually being exploited to satiate the present desires of man, man loses sight of the fact that Eden, like man, was created as a living, breathing organism, that nurtures, that at some point will be pushed to its limits, and when it ceases to live, so will man cease to be. That is man's choice, not God's.  Not even secularists and atheists can blame God for it is man who has chosen; and when man looks into the mirror, he will see a Godless eternity that is the very place he had destroyed in which he himself can have no life.  Only Christ can resurrect the dead, and it would be up to Him, and only Him, to offer mercy to those dead by their own choice of sins and give them eternal life. Jesus said, "'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'" [1]


[1] http://www.usccb.org/bible/john/14 at 6, quoted without footnotes.