O happy fault!

"Felix culpa" is my great war cry leading to the Triumph of the Cross, the great feast, we celebrated this week.  This feast is an important date on my annual calendar, for it reminds me of friendships that are dear, sustaining and life-giving.   

It will make no sense to the uninitiated to learn that "O happy fault" is a line that brings me great joy.  It is a joy that comes with relishing so many memories of good friends and good times.  Our world may be a basket case, may be deranged, but it is ever full of love, friendship and good memories.  The world may be down but it is not defeated, not by a long shot.   

On feast of the Triumph of the Cross, we have been good friends for 39 years.

I sense that, if we lose our sense of mortality, we lose a sense of true religion and thus lose touch with the deeper realities of life.  This leads to our becoming self-contained and comfortable, even arrogant in our perspectives on life, denying what truly matters in life.  

Despite all the calls for otherwise, I am seeing a church that too often remains as a clerical sect.  I feel strongly on this issue, for clericalism contributes to a church in decline and to a loss of whole generations to the church and faith.  I see this at least, in the West, where a social price is being paid for the loss of religion and its life giving values.  

In today's world, the Church is called to respond to the cries of lost generations, those suffering in wars and conflicts, our poor and marginalised, mot to running clerical shows.  As I share this, sometimes, I feel like a lone voice, but that is okay.  Here, I am not running on a tangent.  Rather, I am hitting on a core issue, which is - "We are all equal, we are all in this thing, called life, together".  If not, we become disconnected and dislocated.  

Going back to where I started, the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross shows us God's most poignant act of love, carried out for the sake of life for all.  This was committed in the midst of harsh, human reality and incredible suffering.  It involved raw emotion, within the rough and tumble of life.  All this was experienced by God, whose powerful and everlasting act of love and life was lived out in the midst of humanity, as we are, and continues to today.  Our God is truly a God with us.  

We give witness to this essential truth, core value of life, through friendship.  True friends are a great gift from God.  They are also reminders that we are called to be a friend with neighbour and planet, helping each other through it all.  Much more, they tell us who God is in the midst of life's disasters and chaos, through every possibility of life.  They tell us that God is with us, no matter what.  

O happy fault.