Life is Worth Living: Episode 2

Episode 2: Stop World, I Want To Get On

Main message:
“The world is worth living in and the world is worth saving.” Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

My takeaways:

I noticed that Bishop Fulton Sheen is very well read. He often quotes people from memory. For example:

“The world is too much with us, late and soon.” William Wordsworth

He peppers his presentation with humorful anecdotes. My favorite in this video was when he recalled asking a group of children:
“What do you have to do to get forgiveness of sin?”
and a boy answered: “First you have to sin.”

Main points:

People think too much of the world, are too caught up in the world, i.e secularism*.

The 3 areas people tend to view through a secular lens are:
1. Humanity
2. Science/Technology
3. World Involvement

But Bishop Fulton Sheen lists the following people as models of viewing those areas through the Christian lens.
1. Pope John XXIII: “a man who saw Christ in all humanity.”
Fulton recounts Pope John’s visit to a prisoner who had murdered his wife. John tried talking to the man but he didn’t answer. John asked the guard to let him in the cell where the man kept his back to John. John said to him: “I’ve never been married, but if I had been, I might have killed my wife too.” The man turned and hugged him.

2. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French scientist who believed in God and “saw the whole universe ablaze with Christ. A man who saw Christ in everything that was scientific and cosmic.”

3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: a German pastor and theologian known for his opposition to National Socialism. A man who saw Christ involved in everything that was worldly, in law, in medicine, in everything.

“Just as in Christ, the reality of God entered the reality of the world, so too that which is Christian is to be found in the world, the holy in the profane. So I would not speak of God in the borders of life but at its center, in its life, in its prosperity. God is the beyond in the midst of life and Christians must participate in the sufferings of Christ in this worldly life. (…)
You never can look at the world without God and you cannot look at God without the world.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer

*Secularism: secularism, a worldview that separates religion from other realms of human existence.