A Reflection

(Found here)

“… And then reflect that if all times are equal before God, if His eternity is a radiant center from which all points on the circumference of time are at an equal distance, it is not the same with the ages and with us, who dwell on the circumference. We are here at a given point on the mighty wheel, not elsewhere. If we are here, it is because God has placed us here. Every moment of duration concerns us, and every age is our neighbor, as well as every man; but the word ‘neighbor’ is a relative word to which the wisdom of Providence attaches a precise meaning for each of us, and to which each of us, in submissive wisdom, must also attach a precise meaning.

Here I am, a man of the 20th century, living in a time of permanent drama, witnessing upheavals such as perhaps the globe never before saw since the mountains rose and the seas were driven into their caverns. What have I to do for this panting, palpitating century? More than ever before thought is waiting for men, and men for thought. The world is in danger for lack of life-giving maxims. We are in a train rushing ahead at top speed, no signals visible. The planet is going it knows not where, its law has failed it: who will give it back its sun?

… Every age is not as good as every other, but all ages are Christian ages, and there is one which for us, and in practice, surpasses them all: our own. In view of it are our inborn resources, our graces of today and tomorrow, and consequently the efforts that we must make in order to correspond with them.

Let us not be like those people who always seem to be pallbearers at the funeral of the past. Let us utilize, by living, the qualities of the dead. Truth is ever new. Like the grass of morning, moist with glistening dew, all the old virtues are waiting to spring up afresh. God does not grow old. We must help our God to renew, not the buried past and the chronicles of a vanished world, but the eternal face of the earth.

… Listen now to the virtues that God asks of [us].”

~A. D. Sertillanges, O.P.