Well Said: Secular and Religious Optimism

Here's another good bit from Night of the Confessor (read more about that book here). This is from the introduction.

Much has already been written about the naivete of secular optimism (an Enlightenment faith in "progress" as the panacea) and its failure. However, I would like to take a stand against "religious optimism"--facile belief, making use of people's anxiety and suggestibility for a manipulatory "bargain with God," and providing simplistic "pious" answers to complex questions

It is my deeply held belief that we must not conceal our crises. We must not evade or elude them. And we must not let them scare us. Only when we have passed through them can we be "remolded" into a state of greater maturity and wisdom. I would like, in this book, to show that the crisis of the world around us, and also the "crises of religion" (whether that is taken to mean the decline in the influence and stability of traditional religious institutions, the dwindling persuasiveness of existing systems of religious interpretations of the world and faith, or personal crises in "spiritual life) are enormous windows of opportunity opened to us by God. These are challenges for us "to put out into the deep."

I regard the awakening of just such an attitude to life--not avoiding crises but taking up one's cross--to be one of Christianity's most valuable contributions. Christianity is not primarily "a system of dogmatic texts," but instead a method, a way, a route. Following the way of the one who did not evade the darkness of Gethsemane, Good Friday, or the "descent into hell" of Holy Saturday.

Every Christian has heard plenty of reflections and sermons on the theme of the Easter events, but has Easter really become the key to understanding our life and the present situation of the Church? For many of us "the cross" tends to evoke purely personal problems, such as illness and old age. I fear that the notion that a great deal within ourselves, within the Church, within our faith, and within our certainties has to "die off," to be crucified in order to make room for the Resurrected one is quite alien to many of us Christians.

When we confess the Easter faith, at whose center is the paradox of victory through an absurd defeat, why are we so afraid of our own defeats--including the demonstrable weaknesses of Christianity in the world of today? Isn't God speaking to us through these realities, similar to the way He did when He spoke through the events that we commemorate when we read the story of Easter?

That hits the nail on the head for me. Catholicism's embrace of "take up your cross" and the ability to "offer up" our suffering is something that takes the inevitable hardships of human existence and elevates them to something holy. In other words, nothing is wasted.

That includes our current struggles with the government on behalf of religious liberty and the truths of our faith. Let us look for how God is opening a way to speak to us through these realities.