Chaplain's Report
Dear Brother Knights,
There is a story of a person who once saw a beautiful rose growing in the weed-filled yard of an abandoned house. The house had been vacant for some time. When he tried to pull the rose out of the ground, he found that its roots extended more than 9 feet across the property line and ended up in the well-tended garden of a next-door neighbour. That beautiful rose was able to grow and flourish in the midst of weeds because its root system was connected to a source from which it received constant nourishment and moisture.
D. Elton Trueblood, a noted 20th century theologian said once, “The terrible danger of our time consists in the fact that ours is a cut-flower civilization. Beautiful as cut flowers may be ... they will eventually die because they are severed from their sustaining roots. We are trying to maintain the dignity of the individual apart from deep faith that every person is made in God’s image and is therefore precious in God’s eyes.”
Dear Brothers, maybe some of you heard on the news recently about attempts to cut our Christian roots in various parts of the world. One of the headlines of this month was the ruling of the European Court, which in response to a complaint by an Italian secularist campaigner, said that the display of crucifixes violated the religious rights of pupils. As a result the crucifixes from public places in Italy must be removed. Another recent example of cutting our Christian roots is a bill presented by the Labour government in England, called the “Equality Bill”, which in essence is a restriction on the expression of any Christian symbols at Christmas time.
The Equality Bill combines all previous equality legislation in the U.K., and includes a range of new provisions. As this bill is debated, Monsignor Andrew Summersgill, general secretary of the Catholic Bishops' Conference, in a letter to MPs wrote, ""Under existing legislation, we have seen the development of a risk-averse culture with outcomes as ridiculous as reports of a local authority instructing tenants to take down Christmas lights in case they might offend Muslim neighbours, or of authorities removing the word Christmas out of cultural sensitivity to everyone except Christians. The Christian Institute, Britain's leading Christian political lobby group, has listed incidents where public displays of Christianity at Christmas have already come under attack. Councils around Britain are removing all references to the name "Christmas" from their 2009 events. Birmingham City Council has changed the name of this year's light-switching-on event to the generic "Winterval."
Dear Brother Knights, I am very proud to be a part of the Council, which took upon itself such a wonderful and praiseworthy idea of spreading the message of keeping Christ in Christmas. Just yesterday, it was a joy for me on my way from Kelowna to follow a car with our magnet on its bumper. Maybe some of you listened to the song by “Go Fish” that I forwarded to our Great Knight. The message there is the same – Keep Christ in Christmas. However, as the singer stated, some people do not want that because it intimidates. And rightly so, since Christ came to intimidate us. He disturbs us by what He is. We can compare ourselves to other people and feel that we are good and often even much better than they are. But when we compare ourselves to Jesus, we see how far we have fallen short of what God created us to be. Jesus disturbs us by showing us what we may become. When we stand in His presence, our first word will be, “I am not like Him,” but our second will be, “But I can be like Him by God’s grace. I ought to be like Him. I want to be like Him.”
Jesus disturbs us by the call of human need. We cannot be in the presence of Jesus and be at rest, at peace, as long as there are people suffering. He disturbs us about the injustices of our social order, about world peace, world hunger, about the hatred and the sin in our lives. He makes us restless about these evils that we may give ourselves to the changing of them.
Dear Brothers Knights, why does Jesus disturb us? Only for one reason: to heal us. He is the Divine Disturber in order that He may become the Divine Healer. Just as a physician will break a crooked bone in order to set it straight, God may break a wrong spirit in order to give us a chance to possess the right spirit – the Holy Spirit. Dear friends, continue to be connected to our Christian roots. Keep Christ in Christmas; keep Christ in your hearts.
