“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…” (Mt 28:19). But the dynamism of this mission, this openness and breadth of the Gospel, cannot be revised to read: “Go into the world and become the world yourselves! Go into the world and confirm it in its secularity!” The opposite is true.
The holy mystery of God, the mustard seed of the Gospel, cannot be identified with the world but is rather destined to permeate the whole world. That is why we must find again the courage to embrace what is sacred, the courage to distinguish what is Christian – not in order to segregate it, but in order to transform it – the courage to be truly dynamic.
In an interview in 1975, Eugene Ionesco, one of the founders of the theater of the absurd, expressed this with all the passion of seeking and searching that characterizes the person of our age. I quote here a few sentences from that interview. “The Church does not want to lose her present clientele; but she does want to gain new members. The result is a kind of secularization that is truly pitiful. The world is losing its way; the Church is losing herself in the world…I once heard a priest say in Church: Let us be happy, let us shake hands…Jesus is pleased to wish you a pleasant ‘good day’! Before long they will be setting up a bar in church for the Communion of bread and wine and offering sanfwiches and Beaujolais…Nothing is left to us; nothing solid. Everything is in flux. But what we need is a rock.”
It seems to me that if we listen to the voices of our age, of people who are consciously living, suffering, and loving in the world today, we will realize that we cannot serve this world with a kind of banal officiousness. It has no need of confirmation but rather of transformation, of the radicalism of the Gospel.
From: Diener eurer Freude, pp. 108-9
