Time Immortal

Nicholas has a request:

Sometime, would you care to post some examples of otherwise puzzling features of moral lives which your Religion explains?

Perhaps the Reader can tell me what I am not getting about what Nicholas has said regarding “puzzling” features of moral lives, because off the top of my head I’m just not getting it. A Christian moral lifestyle isn’t anything complex to achieve — one is most of the way there if the life one lives is in keeping with the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes; all that remains is active participation in the sacramental life of the Church at that point which, as with most rituals, takes time to learn, understand, and internalize.

But I digress.

As I have answered other Readers before in regard to specific requests for content, I will write about whatever stories I happen to notice in a given day. If, on occasion, I stumble across a story of a person whose life is a real testament to the power of Christ’s sanctifying grace, I will of course post that story, because such a person is worth remarking on.

Interestingly, the Church feels much the same way, and actually does maintain a rather comprehensive list of people “whose lives have been marked by the exercise of heroic virtue, and only after this has been proved by common repute for sanctity and by conclusive arguments“ — in other words, the saints. One can also look to the lives of those who have been called “Blessed” by the Church. In the lives of the martyrs and confessors there are many and varied examples of people whose lives have either been lived in a very close communion with the words of Christ and the will of God, or of those whose lives have been wholly transformed by their encounter with the Lord.

I suppose, given more time, that I could repeat the stories of the lives of the saints here, adding untold thousands of articles to the site. But then, why re-invent the wheel, O Reader?

Of course, in so directing both the good Reader in general, and Nicholas in particular, we will come to an interesting test, pace what Mark Shea remarked on previously: “”Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is simply a psychological justification for saying, “I will refuse to accept anything that challenges my comfortable materialist worldview.” You can do that. But don’t insult my intelligence by calling it “rational”. Rational people follow the evidence where it leads. Pig-headed ideologues ignore inconvenient evidence…“