Thomas Griffin 3/24/23 (For The Federalist)
Follow My Blog
Read “Empty Tomb Project: The Magazine”
March 25 marks the date that the Catholic Church and many other Christians commemorate the Annunciation of Mary. This is when we recognize the momentous moment Mary accepted the invitation from the angel Gabriel to become the mother of God. Through the “yes” of a teenage girl in the backwaters of Galilee 2,000 years ago, God became one of us and saved us from ourselves.
As we look around at our broken world, even the non-religious can see that things are not as they should be. God used Mary to begin rebuilding his kingdom here on earth, and so we can confidently look to her example in how we can begin repairing the brokenness permeating our culture today.
ome might say a girl like Mary from so long ago in a place like Galilee is irrelevant. In order to fix American society, we need further advances in technology and people in power who know what they are doing. The solution, however, is much more simple.
What we need is to recover the original blueprint for the human person. This blueprint is found in Mary. Yes, the teenager from the Middle East who lived two millennia ago is the model for the revival of the future. In fact, her apparent irrelevance today would not have been much different from her seemingly unimportant life in her own time. That is how God works: he uses the seemingly insignificant to change the world. He rebuilds by using the simple.
So, performing the simple things with intentionality, virtue, and perseverance (like Mary) means that we need to have an acute awareness of how we can do the simple things better. Mary’s witness shows us that sacrificing for our family is the most simple but powerful thing we can do.
In a homily from 1986, Pope St. John Paul II famously said, “As the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live.” The pope knew the sociological fact that the most powerful and impactful social structure in any culture is not the government, it is the family.
The way adults parent and love each other in marriage determines the type of children they raise and the manner in which those children will one day love their own spouses and children. It seems too simple, but fixing the family will fix our broken culture.
Read the Full Article HERE
Thomas Griffin is the chairperson of the religion department at a Catholic high school on Long Island where he lives with his wife and two sons. He has a masters degree in theology and is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Empty Tomb Project: The Magazine.
Follow My Blog
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Empty Tomb Project 