By Holy Family Parish
The Second Vatican Council spoke of the Scriptures as the “pure and everlasting source of spiritual life” (Dei Verbum, 21). With this conviction, Holy Family Parish recently underwent the Unlocking the Mystery of the Bible program hosted by well-known scholar and evangelist, Jeff Cavins. It is our hope that you will join us for this program as well.
The urgency of this program is felt more strongly now than when we began prior to the lockdown. The reason for this is that now the Catholic Church in Victoria has re-entered a kind of “sacramental desert”, in which participation in the source and summit of Christian faith is no longer available to us. What we need is an opportunity to come together (even if remotely) and encounter the living God, the God witnessed to in the Scriptures. We need to dive more deeply into the story that has shaped Israel and now shapes us, the New Israel, the Church. And this, really, is one of the most powerful things this program achieves.
In unexpected ways, it breathed new life back into Catholicism for people by taking a “narrative” approach. I’m not sure what your experience of Catholicism has been, or of Catholic education, but for a lot of people growing up, their experience of being taught the faith has been an ultimately incoherent one. What I mean by that is this: the presentation of the faith has involved the consuming of unconnected pieces of information and unconnected perspectives on moral issues that aren’t centred or grounded in something meaningful. Catholicism becomes, in this way, uprooted from its spiritual ancestry and left without a meaningful story that makes sense of its being here at all.
What this program does so effectively is situate the Catholic story within the much larger and broader story of the biblical one. Within this story, the previously unconnected jumble of doctrines and beliefs comes into sharper focus. You’re able to recover the deep spiritual roots of the Catholic faith – and realise just how deep they go. If you’re looking for a “Catholic family tree”, or a spiritual ancestry that predates the birth of the Church, then plunging into the biblical story is essential. It’s only when we start wrestling with the God of the Bible – the God who actively comes to us, makes covenants with us, loves us, forgives us, heals us, speaks to us, recreates us – that the spiritual life of the Church makes any sense.
And another thing: at the heart of the Church’s faith stands the person of Jesus of Nazareth and the mystery of his life, death and resurrection. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to us (but maybe it does) that much of what Jesus himself says and does won’t make any sense to us either unless we see him not only against the backdrop of Israel’s story but as its fulfilment. This program effectively brings Jesus into much sharper focus as well.
So, please join us. It’s an incredible journey. We’ve done it once and we want to do it again. Hopefully, we can keep on doing it and spread the word.
For more information https://www.facebook.com/event...