In recent days, given the three Oscars and the fame of the actor, there has been much talk of a film entitled “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a story by writer Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. It is the story of a man who is born old, with the monstrous features of an 80-year-old and, growing, he is reinvigorated to the point of dying as a real baby. The story is of course paradoxical, but there could be an all-together more real application if transferred to the spiritual plane. We are born “old men” and we must become “new men.” The whole of life, not just adolescence, is a “an evolutionary age!”
According to the Gospel, one is not born a child but becomes a child! St. Maximus of Turin, a Father of the Church, describes Easter as a passage “from sins to holiness, from vices to virtues, from old age to youth: a youth understood not of age but of simplicity. We were in fact fallen by the old age of sins, but by the Resurrection of Christ we were renewed in the innocence of children.”[15]
Lent is the ideal time to apply oneself to this reinvigoration. A preface of this time states: “You have established for your children a time of spiritual renewal, so that they may convert to you with their whole heart, and free from the ferment of sin live the vicissitudes of this world, always oriented toward eternal goods.” A prayer, stemming from the Gelasian Sacramentary of the 7th century is still in use in the Easter Vigil; it proclaims solemnly: “Let the whole world see and recognize that all that is destroyed is reconstructed, all that is old is renewed, and everything returns to its integrity, through Christ who is the principle of all things.”
The Holy Spirit is the soul of this renewal and rejuvenation.
Read it all.
Father Raniero Cantalamessa's First Lenten Sermon
In recent days, given the three Oscars and the fame of the actor, there has been much talk of a film entitled “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a story by writer Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. It is the story of a man who is born old, with the monstrous features of an 80-year-old and, growing, he is reinvigorated to the point of dying as a real baby. The story is of course paradoxical, but there could be an all-together more real application if transferred to the spiritual plane. We are born “old men” and we must become “new men.” The whole of life, not just adolescence, is a “an evolutionary age!”
According to the Gospel, one is not born a child but becomes a child! St. Maximus of Turin, a Father of the Church, describes Easter as a passage “from sins to holiness, from vices to virtues, from old age to youth: a youth understood not of age but of simplicity. We were in fact fallen by the old age of sins, but by the Resurrection of Christ we were renewed in the innocence of children.”[15]
Lent is the ideal time to apply oneself to this reinvigoration. A preface of this time states: “You have established for your children a time of spiritual renewal, so that they may convert to you with their whole heart, and free from the ferment of sin live the vicissitudes of this world, always oriented toward eternal goods.” A prayer, stemming from the Gelasian Sacramentary of the 7th century is still in use in the Easter Vigil; it proclaims solemnly: “Let the whole world see and recognize that all that is destroyed is reconstructed, all that is old is renewed, and everything returns to its integrity, through Christ who is the principle of all things.”
The Holy Spirit is the soul of this renewal and rejuvenation.
Read it all.