“We, though many, are one Body in Christ” Romans 12:5

At the end of the day, all of us, believers and non-believers, pious and impious, share one common humanity and all end up on the same road. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that this has many implications. It’s no secret that today religious practice is plummeting radically everywhere in the secular world.Those who are opting out don’t all look the same, nor go by the same name. Some are atheists, explicitly denying the existence God. Others are agnostics, open to the accepting the existence of God but remaining undecided. Others self-define as nones;asked what faith they belong to they respond by saying none. There are those who define themselves as dones, done with religion and done with church. Then there are the procrastinators, persons who know that someday they will have to deal with the religious question, but, like Saint Augustine, keep saying, eventually I need to do this, but not yet!Finally, there’s that huge group who define themselves as spiritual-but-not-religious, saying they believe in God but not in institutionalized religion. I suspect that God doesn’t much share our anxiety here, not that God sees this as perfectly healthy (humans are human!), but rather that God has a larger perspective on it, is infinitely loving, and is long suffering in patience while tolerating our choices. Gabriel Marcel once famously stated, To say to someone ‘I love you’ is to say, ‘you will never be lost’.As Christians, we understand this in terms of our unity inside the Body of Christ. Our love for someone links him or her to us, and since we are part of the Body of Christ, he or she too is linked to the Body of Christ, and to touch Christ is to touch grace. We need to recognize that God loves these persons more than we do and is more solicitous for their happiness and salvation than we are. God loves everyone individually and passionately and works in ways to ensure that nobody gets lost. Ultimately, God is the only game in town, in that no matter how many false roads we take and how many good roads we ignore, we all end up on the one, same, last, final road. All of us: atheists, agnostics, nones, dones, searchers, procrastinators, those who don’t believe in institutionalized religion, the indifferent, the belligerent, the angry, the bitter, and the wounded, end up on the same road heading towards the same destination – death. However, the good news is that this last road, for all of us, the pious and the impious alike, leads to God.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *