WE WILL GET SMALLER

                                               

 

The future for organized religion in our society does not look promising. We will be closing more and more of our church doors as the older generation fades into the sunset. We are realizing a huge culture shift. North Americans and Europeans are moving away from participation and trust in institutions. Participation in church life is one of the first things to go but it is also lessening commitment to family life. 

 

We are experiencing a narrowing of life to the individual. Life is becoming more and more a little monad with little connection and commitment to any other group beyond myself and the people that are meaningful to me. 

 

As we see almost all the volunteer groups disappear, the service organizations being buoyed up by members well past the seventy year best before date, and our traditional faith communities shrink, we can see that we are moving more and more into a very lonely society.

 

The large media are interested in the churches only if there is controversy or scandal. Their disinterest indicates what church communities actually mean to our society. The very few items of reporting indicate how irrelevant churches are to the society.

 

This could make your day go completely flat. It is so depressing!

 

But maybe being pushed into irrelevancy in our society is the season when new fire can emerge from these decaying embers.

 

Christianity started out very small, not only were we seen as irrelevant but we were illegal. This was a group that was politically incorrect; Christians staunchly proclaimed that Christ was Lord (i.e., the divine one) and Cesar was not (he was only a human being). Talk about going against the grain! No wonder Christians became the object of persecutions early on within the Roman Empire.

 

Being reduced can also be our great moment of rebirth. This will force us to focus on what our Church is all about. 

 

As the early Church welcomed the poor and the dispossessed, we too must open our hearts to the many lonely and forgotten people in our society. The local parish must work hard to become a community that people want to belong to and participate in. Can we move to being a community of belonging and away from the religious service station?

 

The strongest service that the Church can offer is the “meaning for life.” We are people who live in a much larger world than the individual. We live with the transcendent and root peoples’ lives in a God who wants so much more from us and calls us to an everlasting life.

 

The pagans of long ago observed very quickly how the Christians took care of one another. We must move more and more into being a Church of service and compassion. This may be very difficult when we live in a society that is so mobile and so involved in doing our own thing. Rebirth can be very painful, but do not all processes to new life involve pain, suffering and some confusion?

 

Small can mean a more meaningful and purposeful life as a faith community. What appears as a disaster may be the moment that we will be forced to arise from the ashes of past glory and power to a new life of service and community. 

 

THE DRUG EPIDEMIC IN CANADA

We live in very dangerous times. We live in a culture that is very accepting of recreational drug use. We are also very affluent and can afford to purchase street drugs at very inflated prices. Parents (many who have a history of recreational drug use spanning their younger days) worry that they might lose one of their adult children through an overdose. The fear is very real. At the same time, they acknowledge that they cannot do anything about the possibility that their son or daughter might hit a bad dose and be gone. The child they raised with such care could evaporate into one of the nameless statistics of overdoses in Canada.

 

Compounded this epidemic is the arrival and abuse of prescription pain killers that has gripped North America during the past six years. Many men, suffering severe pain from an accident, have been prescribed opioids, which unfortunately developed into a severe addiction. 

 

This time around the drugs are synthetic. You do not need to import drugs from some far away country. You can manufacture the drugs (fentanyl and crystal meth as some of the most common street drugs) in your own garage – and cheaply!

 

When you put the numbers of overdoses in Canada at around 4500 in 2018 you conclude that everyone is just one family away from an overdose. Drug addiction covers every occupation, ethnic background, religious and cultural background. Also, very frightening is the fact that almost all these deaths are accidental (people who overdose do not set out to die). Eighty percent of overdose deaths are men who die alone.

 

During the shutdown and isolation caused by the coronavirus the Province of British Columbia recorded 170 suspected toxicity deaths in the month of May, 2020. This comes to 5.5 deaths per day. The isolation has caused a 93% increased in overdose deaths over the same month, May of 2019. The numbers shout out at us.

 

Too many Canadians are just dropping their hands in helplessness. They do not know how to control the drugs. And they are rendered helpless when they recognize that the drug used or the addicted are ingesting the drugs themselves.People shrug their shoulders: no one is forcing them to take these drugs.

As a Church we may not have any of the answers to this problem but we will not back away. Pope Francis has challenged the Church to have dirt on our feet from being out in the streets with the people. We walk with them in their struggles. 

                                                                                                           

We admit our powerlessness to defeat this mountainous problem but we care, support and walk with those parents who are trying everything to get their addicted adults into treatment. We care about the parent who honestly confess that they did not know their son was a user. (Most often these adults live and work in a different city from their parents).

 

lost sheep that Jesus taught us may be the thirty-four year old accountant, who  is working a very responsible position with his accounting firm. Even if he overdoses he is still someone’s son, brother, friend and fellow human being. 

 

As a Church we hold the pain of the addicted individual, his family, all his friends in our hearts. Not only do we pray for them but we want to be with his family in compassion and understanding.