This Saint day website I visit had this nifty insight as it reflected on today's feast of Saint Camillus de Lellis:
Are you sick and in need of healing? Do you realize that you can lay hand on yourself, family, friends and call on Jesus with faith to heal . This should be the first step before going to the hospital. Medications and hospitals are gift of God to mankind. They should be used with deep gratitude to God. Jesus is still active in the healing ministry and testimonies abound.You see that? Lay on hands as a first order? I'm sure they don't mean if you're pinned under a truck or your arm just got sliced off by a lawnmower. Though I don't know.
I've become more convinced than ever that the Church's 'keep up with the worldly Joneses' approach has allowed endless seeds of doubt and confusion to be sown in the minds of the faithful for generations. It's even to the point where a Catholic exorcist says that the Church assumes a purely materialistic, atheistic explanation for problems and if that fails, then we go demon and angel.
That hasn't worked, and it reflects poorly on the spiritual Creation that Christianity proclaims. For Christianity proclaims God and God's Creation, the Holy Trinity, and the whole of the human person made in God's image and alive in his Creation, which includes that one aspect of Creation we call the universe. Letting the godless and the secularist have the wheel has allowed us to assume the secular view that the vast, eternal universe is all that and a bag of chips, and then maybe spirit stuff (but probably not).
So there you have it. I won't make prescriptions about just when you should default to the laying on of hands before consulting the medical doctors of the day. But just the fact that someone says it as such a matter of course was worth noting.
"On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist's shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that "only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations". You see the little rift? "Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason." That's the game, Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE"
ReplyDeleteYep. At times it almost seems as if we've gone to the old 'you get salvation the old-fashioned way, you earn it' approach. Religion is almost of no consequence, it's being a good person, as currently defined by our morally suspect generation.
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