Dear friends,
Good day to you all. Hope everything goes well with you.
I happened to watch a video clip on the social media. A person on the video was talking about education. Quoting Nelson Mandela who said, "Education must change the world", the person was saying that he differed from Mandela’s view about education. This man was saying so because according to him the so called educated people don’t seem to be happy, with all this education the world has not become a better place, with all this education, the world does not enjoy peace. The education accord-ing to him has become only the transmission of information, not the transmission of values. He quoted C.S. Lewis saying that education without values helps to create clever devils. This seems quite right looking at the present scenario.
The fault is not with education in itself. The fault is with the people who receive it and do not live it. The education is not assimilated but it is annihilated by those who are not ready to abide by the values that are supposed to be transmitted to the learner. The real education should be the transmission and planting of the human values, without which the words of CS Lewis would become hundred per cent true. I don’t want to deeply delve into it as it is a vast subject. My concern is about Christianity, not necessarily as religion (of course it is), but as a way of life.
We Christians are well informed about Christ, his teachings, scriptures and so on. Most of the time I am afraid if it is only the transmission of just information about these elements or it is really the transmission of Christ himself with all his teachings and values. The transmission of information about Christ and his teachings is not go-ing to make us Christians and they can not unless we assimilate this information into our lives and make them our own. The transmission of this information should be such that they transform us into the personification of the teachings of Christ. If this does not happen, we also will be well informed people about Christ, not Christians.
All our reading of the Scriptures, all our participation in the liturgy, all the listening to the exegesis of the scriptures and homilies, all our individual and communitarian forms of prayers should not only be the means of transmission of information but cat-alysts of inner transformation into Christ (alter Christus). That is when we can call ourselves Christians or the followers and believers of Christ. We need really to make a deep examination of ourselves as to see whether we are just well informed or we are real Christians.
God bless you.
Yours sincerely in the Risen Lord,
Fr. A. Antony
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