Willed remembering or willed forgetting? “People have forgotten God.”

What happens when an awareness of the divine dissipates in a culture? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s arresting quote below is worthy of reflection.

Our context includes people, using negativity towards the Church, to then press for an end to the Lord’s Prayer in Parliament. (https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Procedure/Parliamentaryprayer).

By contrast, at our Bishops’ meeting this week we shared current stories of how we see the sovereignty of God, in the grace of Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, breaking into peoples’ lives so wonderfully. Stories of beautiful dreams and visions drawing people towards ordination; stories of wonderful generosity as Parishes make space for newcomers.

I talked about my long involvement with the Karen since visiting their Refugee Camps in 1990 and assisting the first of their number to make a new life here....

Then there are the many other stories of God-awareness which lead people to practise their faith in regular worship. “I just find life goes better when I turn up to Holy Communion. No matter what I felt about it on the way,” said one Churchwarden.

“The liturgy just helps me connect the narrative of my life to the divine narrative, the transcendent glory of God. Worship just helps me connect, feel part of something much grander”.

Yes, there is a lot of forgetting God, but a lot of remembering, too …

We persist!

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

“More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened. …. The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimensions, have been a determining factor is all the major crimes of this century.”

 Bishop Philip Huggins, NCCA President