Relationship healing

Under the Old Law in the Old Testament there are certain precepts to establish and maintain relationships. The ceremonial commands are about the relationship with the Other or God: establishing, nourishing and restoring when lost a good relationship.

Christ comes to restore and elevate this relationship from one of creature to Creator to one of children to Father. We have discussed Baptism as the beginning of this restoration - a remaking - but as noted in the comments on that post, people still sin. Our relationships need nourishing and they still need restoring when we mess them up.

The sacrament of Reconciliation or Confession does just this - reconciles us to God and to each other in the Church, the Body of Christ, following our breaking of this tie.

Why do we need to speak to a priest about our failings in order to be reconciled?

To make it real. Part of our tendency to sin is our capacity for self-deception. We hide from ourselves our motivations, our failings, our fault. Speaking our fault brings it to reality and lets it go.

This is real reconciliation. It is real healing for this incomparable relationship with our Father who is in heaven.

For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8.38-39)

What do you think?

Please keep sending in your questions. The reflection on baptism is a short precis of Fr Bruno's talk at Theology in the Bar, which takes place at the Southsider pub every Tuesday evening at 8.15pm.

Thanks for the questions and comments received. Make a comment or send an email to ask a question, start a debate, or state your views.

AA

Who needs salvation?

Christianity emphasises the importance of Baptism for anyone who wants to follow Jesus and be saved. This was Jesus's instruction (John 3.5). Baptism saves us from eternal death and brings us to a new life, a real life in Christ.

But who needs salvation?

'All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God' (Romans 3.23)

In order to understand Baptism, we need also to see that all human beings are flawed, broken, in need of restoration. This re-creation offered by Jesus is found in the washing of Baptism.

Baptism is the Sacrament by which we become Christians. It frees us from Original Sin, makes us children of God, temples of the Holy Spirit and members of the Church.

But it also points forward, allowing true human flourishing by the gifts of faith, hope and love by which God brings us to himself.

We are pilgrims: Christians are in the world but not of the world (cf. John 15.19) and the grace of Baptism begins and points towards the destination of our lives - Jesus Christ. This destination is only reached with God's work. This is begun in Baptism.

Church hunt

On Saturday the 23^rd January, the CSU organised a sponsored Church hunt across Edinburgh in aid of KTDO. The idea was to try and visit all the 28 catholic parishes listed in Edinburgh in just one day. The event was a great success and raised well over £600, not to mention everyone having a fantastic – although very tiring time – doing it.

The CSU is very busy helping with fundraising for the new Chapel - for more information see

http://keepingthedooropen.op.org

The Door is open again

We're starting Almighty Answers again, ready to receive any question about Christianity, from anyone, anytime...

From now on there will be a weekly post to which we will invite questions and comments, and we will also post on the life of the Chaplaincy here at George Square. Tell your friends to drop in to almighty answers....

Many thanks

Thanks for your questions the past couple of weeks, those posted on the blog, and those answered by e-mail. We'll be updating the blog again before Christmas, and then next Semester we will be having another "corner a cleric" week and we look forward to receiving your questions then....

The cruelty of God?

I can see the point of religion as a way of dealing with the difficulties of life and for finding comfort, but the basic problem of how a good God could let people suffer seems to be a pretty good argument against the existence of God. I'm happy to be spiritual, but I don't see how I can take all those doctrines seriously when we look at the world around us...

Our world with its uniquely universal media, is more exposed to the problem of evil and suffering than at any other time, at least in terms of the extent and range of suffering and pain.

By evil we mean many things: malicious actions by human beings; illness; accidents; the devastation sometimes caused by nature. Although these are really very different things, they all raise the question of the existence of a good and loving God.

At the most basic level, Christianity has never seen good and evil as being the same sort of things. The goodness of things existing is fundamental. Without a real world, there would be nothing and no-one to experience anything in the first place. This is why many Christians talk of evil as being a lack of being, rather than a thing in itself.

This doesn't mean that the experience of suffering isn't real - an absence of floor may be a nothing, but my falling through it will be a pretty real experience to me.

So good and evil are not two contraries eternally wrestling with each other. In fact in some ways, evil can be an inevitable consequence of the good. A lot of what we call evil, is really part and parcel of having a physical world. A world of fast cars and lazy cats, such as our cat Jordan, can lead to a world with flattened fur and whiskers in tire tracks. God did not just make a spiritual world but a real material one where there is always balance, struggle, birth and death, and all of this is a necessary consequence of there being a created physical world.

The evil caused by human beings is on a different level, and raises a problem with no easy answer. Why does God let the wicked go on being wicked, and why do terrible things seem to happen to such good people?

How we are to understand our own struggles with suffering which seem to make God so distant, so distant in fact that he can become a question mark simply hanging over an uncertain world? The best answer we have is the cross of Jesus, where we see that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, and where we see in the flesh God's power to bring good out of evil, as out of the greatest evil, the crucifixion of the innocent Jesus, he brings our greatest good, the life of the kingdom where evil is conquered.

Evil is not a logical problem, but a human one and deserves a human answer. The best beginning to finding this is also the way to salvation from evil - the cross of Jesus, God and human.

This has been a short answer for a massive question, but it might get the ball rolling....