To Escape or to Conquer

Since Kim asked, I'll post briefly on my new job. It's as an admissions consultant for a for-profit school out of Utah which recently opened a branch here. Full-time work that is more engaging than tackling problems at the service desk for a retailer, and I can actually start living a life since I can make plans more than a week in advance. Yay! Life is a little more exciting as of late, for sure. Also, other positive things are going on in live, but I'll save those for a later date.


Now, on to what I'd said I would do until Christmas:

The chapters assigned for the past few days in Father Benson's Benedictus Dominus have been dealing with the "Christians vs The World" problem.

Christians have been admonished to transcend the world, to escape it and its perceived evil. Or else we have been counseled to overcome it and replace it with the Kingdom of God as fierce warriors for God. This is a deeply political and religious problem in a pluralistic world. Are Christians to run away from the world so tainted by sin or are they to impose their worldview on others who don't share it? What about hiding our faith so as to not offend others? Or making the government into a charity to care about the poor and needy, whether or not others are so moved to help? Both conservatives and liberals are capable of escaping and conquering the world.

It's incredibly black-and-white, and thankfully both miss the point. To be a Christian isn't about rejecting or conquering the world, but instead giving up both of those ideas. I can't hide from the world because that would be giving up on it (and God doesn't give up, believe me), and I can't conquer it because there's no way I could run it right, as much as I might pretend otherwise.

So we can't reject the world, we can't conquer the world, and there's not much we can do, it seems. We can strive to love the world, even when we sigh as we read about the foolishness and cruelty of human beings to one another. We can't abandon them to their cruelty, just as God doesn't abandon us to our own cruelty and sinfulness. We can't impose our will on them, either, because we're not much better (if we even are better, which I doubt). But we can still love it and serve the people of the world.