Sr. Helena has been reading the Dan Brown novel, so as to be equipped to respond to issues people may raise about it. She summed it up as "an agenda with a little bit of story wrapped around it," and tells me that it is largely an apologia for goddess worship and every other form of paganism. What Brown does, she says, is gently, but persistently, portray the Church as the ultimate oppressor of human freedom and happiness, so that the restoration of paganism (which, after all, is millennia older than any revealed religion) is seen as a return to our "lawful" and right inheritance.
In other words, Christianity is depicted as an intolerable burden that so many poor souls are dragging around. "Let me liberate you," Brown is saying.
And it wouldn't work unless a lot of people really did experience Christian faith (and Catholic faith in particular) as a burden, and not as "the freedom of the children of God," as St. Paul seemed to have experienced and preached it.
So what can we do about that?
First of all, we can ask if we ourselves experience that spiritual freedom, or if there is something obstructing that. (News: the "obstruction" would be sin, not Christianity!)
Then we can ask the Lord to grant us an "infectious" freedom, to make us witnesses to the freedom of the Spirit. This is what made the Apostles so effective in "proclaiming Jesus Christ and him crucified"; this is what made the saints of all ages so appealing, so magnetic.
And we can ask the Lord to show us the path of evangelization marked out for us: how to proclaim Jesus in a pro-active way, not only responding to things--because Dan Brown already had a finger on the pulse of the world when he wrote his novel. That is why it caught on so well. (It's certainly, if you believe Sr. Helena, not because he's an especially good writer!) So how can we have our finger on the pulse of humanity to such an extent that we can already present Jesus as the answer to their unnamed needs and desires, rather than wait until someone else proposes a false answer?
Any ideas?
2 comments:
I had to force myself to read to the end. I found it to be boring and pedantic--like I was being lectured by a snotty, know-it-all professor. Brown created a real "conspiracy theory," and the bad guy is-surprize-the Catholic Church!--harv681
"So how can we have our finger on the pulse of humanity to such an extent that we can already present Jesus as the answer to their unnamed needs and desires, rather than wait until someone else proposes a false answer?"
I think we already do that, all over the place. But its human nature to rebel, ever since Adam and Eve. Everyone has a better idea than God's! And worshipping the goddess is oh so much more fun than taking up the cross.
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