The year 2000

25 February 1999 09:29

Here is another item from Fr. Werenfried van Straaten, the founder of the ‘Aid to the Church in Need’ charity (http://www.kirche-in-not.org).

This year, the last in this millennium, is a preparation for the age to
come. How long this age will last no one knows but the Father. Every
second is precious, an investment in eternity. And so we must not

slacken in our efforts to draw other people with us on our way to the Father. “The whole of the Christian life is like a great pilgrimage to the house of the Father,” writes the Pope in his apostolic letter ‘Tertio Millennio Adveniente’. And he adds, “This pilgrimage takes place in the heart of each person, extends to the believing community and then reaches to the whole of humanity”. This is an appeal to us, to our childlike trust in God and to our generosity. We must draw others along this path, through our prayers, our sacrifice, our example.

An ambitious programme! But God would not have asked it of us without also giving us the grace to accomplish it. He himself takes us by the hand, for He has sent His Only Son into this world. The Holy Spirit speaks to us through Philip in St John’s Gospel (14,8): “Lord, let us see the Father and then we shall be satisfied”, adding Our Lord’s affectionate rebuke to his childlike candour: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know Me? To have seen Me is to have seen the Father”. And each day He shows us in so many wondrous ways that He is there, that He has come in the name of his Father (Jn 5, 43), that He wishes to take us by the hand and lead us to the Father’s house, where He has prepared a place for us. Philip speaks as we do, and Jesus says to us, “No one can come to the Father except through Me”. The Fathers of the Church have expounded this comforting dialogue again and again; through Christ and His Church we come to the Father. As St Cyprian writes, with unrivalled clarity, “He cannot have God for a Father who does not have the Church for a mother”. How grateful we must be that our way of pilgrimage has been so clearly marked out for us and “signposted” everywhere with God’s commandments of love.

But we should not be satisfied with having found this way, thanks to God’s

help and grace. “It is my Father’s will that all should have eternal
life”, says Jesus (Jn 6,40). All that means the whole of humanity. So
now we intend to play our part in this by making the Light of Christ blaze

out brightly in a great Campaign of Lights – “Lumen Christi 2000” we are calling it. By this Light we wish to enter into the new millennium, drawing as many people as possible with us as we do so. May this humble candle flame, lit in a million places around the globe, cast its light further than all the lavish firework displays that will be squandered worldwide. For this light of ours is meant to illuminate the heart, not the sky. And with the proceeds of this worldwide campaign we hope to be able to kindle in many thousands of hearts the spark of love for Christ. We plan to start this campaign at the beginning of Lent and we are counting on your support, so that at the end of this year, the Year of the Father, we may be united in heart and prayer in a worldwide human chain of the children of God, who can join with St Paul in giving, “joyful thanks to the Father” (Col 1, 12).

This Year of the Father is likewise an unrivalled opportunity to remind people of the importance of the father’s role in the family and in society. For it is fathers who “reveal and live on earth the very fatherhood of God”, as John Paul II writes in Familiaris Consortio. How can young people recognise the precious treasure God has given us in our own sexuality when this sexuality is not correctly ordered in the nature of Creation? It is only in this nature that it can develop its fruitfulness and joy. We must begin with marriage, fatherhood and motherhood – this “beautiful vocation” as the Pope describes it – if we are to stop the moral decline and provide a natural barrier to the corruption of our young people. When we get there too late, we end up having to pull them out of the mire. This is exactly what Father Hans, the Franciscan, continues to do with our help, as he develops and extends his “Farms of hope” for young people with drug problems – first in Brazil and now since recently in Berlin too. We give, they receive – and for all of us it tends to our eternal salvation.

Wherever we are, we must gather companions around us on our way of pilgrimage to the Heavenly Father, Who accompanies us in Christ. “Did not our hearts burn within us as He talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?” say the disciples to one another in Emmaus, after Jesus has disappeared from their sight. May our hearts all burn with joy and love on this way to the Father – this is my wish for you all in this, the last year before the Great jubilee of the year 2000.