Brass Tacks (rant #1)

 "Close your eyes and tap your heels together three times. Think to yourself, there's no place like home, there's no place like home...."    - Wizard of Oz.

The New Springtime.   I've been hearing that tedious mantra from the neo-con/charismatic wing of the Church for years, but it is always tinged with a smidgen of optimistic desperation. If you say it enough times it must come true!!  New Springtime, beautiful thought, nice notion, cut adrift from reality.
       The argument goes that the first buds are appearing after the nuclear winter that followed Vatican II, young people strong in faith are taking up the gauntlet thrown down by JPII hence more lay faith groups, more vocations to new orthodox religious groups, eg the Legion of Christ (ahem! let's not go there) etc etc etc .
       It seems as though any meeting of young people under a canopy in a field (with obligatory guitar and clapping) is a sure sign of the  New Springtime. Yet if some visitor from a far distant galaxy landed in this field and watched the proceedings and then went to another field close by where there was an evangelical protestant revival , apart from the Blessed Sacrament, it would be hard pressed to find the difference (in fact it would probably teleport away shaking it's three heads at the expense of two tents rather than one, wasteful bipedal carbon lifeforms!!!).  It seems that the New Springtime consists of any public display of religious feeling,as long as it is vaguely Christian and doesn't  necessarily have to be Catholic.
      The phrases used by these serious  people are along the lines of "How I came to know God" ,"God changed my life" ," I feel a happiness that I never knew before" (for this see the evangelical utterance "I invited Jesus into my heart and now I'm saved"). The common theme is the feel-good factor, experiential, individual and subjective, and mostly based on FEELING!!. The problem with  this is that our feelings and emotions are fickle, we are human therefore we are subject to change.  What was it that Our Lord said about the seeds scattered among the rocks? (Matt 13:5-6) So it is with some of these enthusiastic adherents, life gets in the way, concerns, responsibilites etc. and their faith wanes. It is similar to a match being struck, flares brightly, then steadies to a small flame and eventually splutters into darkenss. But why does this happen?  What is going on?
Find out in the next exciting installment of Brass Tacks!!!