Thursday, October 26, 2006

"Hang in there mate."

A young friend of mine sent me a kind email in response to the last blog post. It epitomizes the spirit I often find among younger people of faith, so I thought I would share the last sentence of the email with you:
... in years to come, as the particular complexities of the baby-boomer generation move from centre-stage in the West, it may well be that "Violence Unveilied" will have more of the impact you initially hoped it would (as it already has in me).
I omit his name, but the fact that he signs off with "Hang in there mate..." suggests correctly that he hails from Down Under. I'm grateful to him and to all those faithful members of his generation, on whom so many of our hopes today depend.

1 comment:

Mark Gordon said...

I have to echo your young friend's comment. I encountered "Violence Unveiled" at a point in my life when I was the most likely to dismiss out of hand anything and anyone that smacked of dissent in the Church. Given the blurbs on the book's jacket, there is no reason apart from grace that I should have ever picked it up. Since then, I've read it three or four times, and while I still disagree with your conclusions about the Church (as I know you do now, as well), I still find "Violence Unveiled" to be an amazing revelation, one of the most life-changing books I have ever encountered.

I have loaned "Violence Unveiled" to liberal Catholic friends who I believe were inclined to read it precisely because of the jacket blurbs. By their own testimony, the book stirred in each of these folks a far deeper appreciation for the Cross of Christ than they had possessed before. That’s a gift, and further proof that the Spirit is not bound.