Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

September 3,1981 PAGE 5 Does Belief Fit Into This Modern World? 7 $ it 7 7 i > * ' * ' 7 •7 7 i 7 • 7 i > 7 ’ * i -» • f i > f . % -7\ 1 % ■ t 7 ' i 7 j t *• 7 " and to take it. Space exploration has shown what a tiny speck this earth of ours is in the vastness of the universe. Some people ask how Christianity will fit into things centuries from now if it is humankind’s fate to move beyond the earth and colonize the galaxies. Of course, as the universe expands before the eyes of our modern explorers, this world seems to grow smaller; its inhabitants come into more frequent contact with each other. One result is that Christians are brought face to face with members of world religions like Buddhism or Hinduism. The discovery that other world religions are now close at hand actually can be a source of anxiety for some people. Our society has seen many young people turn to Eastern religions -- a puzzle to many parents and others. At the same time, the awareness of other world religions can lead people to worthwhile reflection on their own faith and to greater understanding of its meaning. Perhaps, witnessing the Buddhist reverence for all of life, including nature, people begin to think again about this aspect of their own faith. World events also can make people think about their faith. The rise of terrorism, international conflicts, political assassinations, revolutions, the arms race - all these lead people to reflection on the meaning of life and of God’s presence. Can Christianity really help to bring about a better world, people may wonder. What happens when faith is challenged? Do people turn totally away from religious faith? More likely, what happens is their faith in something else -- in technology or politics -- comes to exist side by side with religious faith. That is a reason why reflection on faith seems important. Faith needs attention. Without it, faith may begin to erode, replaced by a consuming devotion to other values. Reflection on faith: That is what the new series that begins on these pages this week is really all about. Our hope is that reflection on faith will be a means of our growing to full stature in Christ, the final destination of our faith journey. Journey? Yes, I think the life of faith is a journey. Sometimes it is peaceful and smooth. Other times it is less so. The events along the journey’s route can drive us to reflection on our faith: what faith is, what it has to do with us, how it can come to life for us and how we can invest ourselves in it. humankind’s fate is to leave this planet and colonize the galaxies - or to encounter other intelligent life. (NC Photo from NASA) SPACE EXPLORATION has shown what a tiny speck this earth of ours is in the vastness of the universe. One may wonder what meaning Christianity will have centuries from now if BY NEIL PARENT Several years ago, a journalist wrote a moving account of his daughter’s last days at a hospice in Oxford, England. The daughter was a young professional in her 20s and, according to the father’s description, approached death from cancer with great tranquility. Although she accepted death in a manner one might expect to see in persons of deep religious faith, she was an atheist. the young woman’s story became valuable for me, provoking reflection on my own faith -- on its role in my life, what I was doing to develop it, and on its great value to me. Then, it occurred to me that motivation to think about faith can stem from many sources. It sometimes happens, as in the case just mentioned, that we are led to such reflection by an encounter with people who place faith in something quite different. There are people who place faith in the basic goodness of human life rather than in KNOW YOUR FAITH (All Articles On This Page Copyrighted 1 981 By N.C. News Service) I can recall my feelings being in turmoil as I read her story. I felt sorrow for those close to her. I also felt some loss of my own that the world was now without someone as talented and sensitive as she. But another side of me struggled to understand how this young woman could confront death devoid of fear or anger. To her, death implied total annihilation. She wasn’t thinking about a future union with God or loved ones. How does one cope with death without religious faith, I wondered. As it turned out, Christianity or another religious expression. Often these people live by high moral principles. They may seem enigmatic to Christians. Many of the world’s citizens place faith in Marxist or Leninist doctrines for renewing society. They are convinced, and they strive to win others to their beliefs. Some people place their faith in the powers of science and technology. Startling advances in these fields have given humankind greater control over its own fate. More and more, human beings assume the power to create life The Gospel Of Mark BY FATHER JOHN J. CASTELOT The Jesus of Mark’s Gospel is a tragic figure, misunderstood, rejected, attacked and executed. But paradoxically, this was the path Jesus took to victory. Mark wanted to get that message across to his readers: The way to glory is the way of the cross. To be a Christian is to follow Jesus -- all the way. So, who is this Jesus Mark sets forth as the center of our faith and our life? It is not easy to answer that question in one column since the Jesus of Mark is as complex as the Gospel of Mark. But it is possible to draw a preliminary sketch. The Gospel of Mark opens with the words: “Here begins the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The word, gospel,” means good news, so another way of saying this is, “Here begins the good news which is Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” For Mark, the Gospel is not merely a matter of the good news about Jesus. For Mark, Jesus is the good news. Since the Gospel of Mark will have a great deal to say about belief, this introduction is supremely important. It points up the fact that Christian faith has as its object a person, not just a set of truths or an ethical code. To be a Christian is to accept Jesus and to live in an intimate interpersonal relationship with him. When we refer to the Jesus of Mark, we indicate that the writer is presenting his own carefully worked out view of Jesus. He paints a portrait intended to answer the needs of his readers in their actual living of the Christian life. For Mark, quite clearly Jesus is the Son of God. He uses the title sparingly but in strategic places: Right at the beginning, for instance, and in the climactic scene on Calvary. Here Mark has the Roman centurion make the astounding act of faith that no one in the Gospel has been able to make up to that point, even those who witnessed his miracles: “Clearly this man was the Son of God!” And what did the centurion see? A battered corpse, hardly calculated to inspire belief in divinity. But there is deep irony here and profound theological truth. It is not the divinity of Jesus, however, but his humanity which dominates Mark’s portrait. Though Mark refers to Jesus as the Son of God and Messiah, a favorite title for Mark is the Son of Man. This title colors the entire second half of the Gospel. Right after Peter acknowledges, “You are the Messiah!” Jesus enjoins silence on him. Immediately we read: Jesus “began to teach them that the Son of Man had to suffer much.” This is the first of three predictions of the passion in this Gospel. The shadow of the cross falls across the Gospel of Mark to such an extent that it has even been called a passion story with an introduction. It is not only the second half of the Gospel that strikes this somber note. As early as Chapter 3 we find Mark talking about some who plotted against Jesus, wondering “how they might destroy him.” The cross is in view from the beginning, and Mark never lets us lose sight of it. For him Jesus is the suffering Son of Man who “has come not to be served but to serve -- to give his life in ransom for the many.” Letters To A Woman Known As “A” BY DAVID GIBSON Flannery O’Connor received a letter in 1955 from a woman now known to the public simply, and anonymously, as A. She opened the letter and was pleased. The young woman basically grasped what Ms. O’Connor was trying to accomplish as a writer. Like many fiction writers, Ms. O’Connor often felt her work was misunderstood. Some people thought her short stories were weird. So, in her response to A, she wrote: “I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles, but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.” Then the Georgia writer explained: “I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement.” Two weeks later, A and Ms. O’Connor exchanged letters again. This time the writer told her new friend: “One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.” In her letters to A, Mrs. OConnor tells of the important role played in her work by belief and by the church. Some fellow believers might not share all her religious views. But when Ms. O’Connor’s letters were published in 1979, quite a few must have been surprised at how large a role she attributed to belief. Ms. O’Connor suffered from lupus erythematosus, a disease long controlled for her by medication. Many people recall her as a talented Southern writer whose gifts were still developing when she died at an early age. Perhaps others remember one of her stories from television. She raised peacocks on the farm where she and her mother lived - an avocation, she said, that “requires everything of the peacock and nothing of me.” And she possessed a riotous sense of humor, often revealed in letters to her literary friends, the Robert Fitzgeralds. Sally Fitzgerald edited Ms. O’Connor’s letters for publication. Often Ms. O’Connor regaled Mrs. Fitzgerald with silly child-rearing advice, not meant to be taken seriously. And once, after being photographed for her publisher, Ms. O’Connor wrote the Fitzgeralds: “They were all bad. (The pictures). The one I sent looked as if I had just bitten my grandmother and this was one of my few pleasures, but all the rest were worse.” Ms. O’Connor was concerned at times about money. But her loyalties were strong and she was known to sell stories to the lowest bidder. In an early letter to A, Ms. O’Connor said she had lots of time on her hands. She apologized for writing again so promptly, not wanting to force A into “a correspondence that you don’t have time for or that will become a burden. ” When she first wrote to Ms. O’Connor, A was not a Catholic. But when she joined the church, Ms. O’Connor wrote: “All voluntary baptisms are a miracle to me and stop my mouth as much as if I had just seen Lazarus walk out of the tomb.” In a letter to A, the writer said she thought it was probably no more difficult in her day to see Christ as God and man “than it has always been, even if today there seem to be more reasons to doubt.” Nor did Ms. O’Connor think scientific discoveries could explain her faith away. On the contrary, she told A: “I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, then I will know what God is... “For me,” she wrote, “it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the Resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws.” AUTHOR FLANNERY O’CONNOR doesn’t think scientific discoveries can explain away her faith. “I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical are, then I will know what God is,” she says. (NC Photo by Joseph De Caro) Discussion Points And Questions 1. Neil Parent talks about the life of faith as a journey, in which events along the way can drive us to reflect on our belief. Think about this and jot down some experiences, past or present, you have had which led you to think about your faith and which ultimately caused your belief to grow. Discuss your discoveries with one other person. 2. Parent suggests people sometimes find their religious faith has come to exist side by side with their new faith in something else, perhaps in technology or in politics. Do you agree with this analysis? Explain your answer. 3. According to David Gibson, author Flannery O’Connor was a woman of deep personal faith. What does she say about the relation between her beliefs and her writing? 4. According to Father John Castelot, what sort of person is Jesus as portrayed in the Gospel of Mark? 5. Why does F ather Castelot call the act of faith in Jesus made by the centurian at the foot of the cross an astounding matter?