"Lifeless....................."

Our substitute teacher Friday is a professor at one of our smaller nearby colleges, teaching in the evenings and accepting daytime vacancies through the week at various levels. He is, obviously, a single, young (compared to this old man), and great with the kids in our Special-Ed unit. We were in the middle of our afternoon craft session when we got into a discussion concerning the moral state of society, not so much from a religious viewpoint, but most certainly from the perspective of our thinking being a learned process that the “system”, itself, imprints upon us and an existence that seems to deteriorate as it goes. We are a people who not only can no longer make change at a cash register, see nothing wrong with cheating if it benefits our cause at the time, and don’t know how to entertain ourselves with a book or a walk, but who can also accurately declare that we are no more than a product of what life has brought unto us. As I suggested to the scholar, my personal choice of whom or what to blame for the condition is the Church in general, admittedly my membership therein making me as guilty as anybody else. It does seem to me, though, that the Body has failed, for the most part, to be that agent of leavening, that light upon a hill, that vessel through which the world might see Christ alive and in our midst. Faith has become but a doctrinal tenet rather than a Reality who lives within us and, while it will always be a stagger down the path, for the individual, for the institution, for humanity as a whole, to work, who we are and what we believe has to flow from the Creator, Himself, not just a cut and paste image we have formed to appease our own sense of security………