In anticipation of this coming weekend’s New York Encounter January 18-20, I just finished re-reading the presentation that Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete , the Crossroads Cultural Center ‘s Chairman, gave to the board earlier this year about the creation of Crossroads, which led to the New York Encounter. It is a beautiful presentation and quite funny at parts.
We are not engaged in any cultural battle because that battle has been won. All we have to do is give witness to that victory. But we cannot give convincing witness unless we experience the reality of that victory within our own lives and heart. Otherwise it is just words, and our cultural efforts will degenerate into a moral reform movement. That’s all. Nothing more need be said.Am I prepared to say before the evidence of my own heart that this is true . . . ? That every Mass and any Sacrament is like the sign at the house of Mary in Nazareth that has the well-known proclamation of the Gospel, Verbum caro factum est , “the Word became flesh,” but in that place there’s one little word added to it that’s different— hic , namely “here.” “Here the Word became flesh.” “Here.”
You see, part of the success of the dominant secularist culture is to try to succeed in hiding how interesting the Christian claim is, how beautiful, but above all, how interesting . . . . In the end, nothing really interests you enough to change your life so that you can fix your attention at least to investigate further.
So . . . as a cultural center, we do interesting things, things that express what we have become interested in . . . At the very least people should be able to say, “These are people who are fascinated.”—not in those words, in whatever words they find it, fascinated by the reality of human personhood, by the reality of human subjectivity, by being some one and not just some thing .
I still recommend reading the presentation in its entirety. (The funny bits were too long to add here.)
