Happy birthday, church!

A personal reflection on the state of the church universal.

This is the day of Twilight,
where love is equated with infatuation.

This is the day of Theology of the Body,
where the glory of God is man fully alive.

This is the day of Lady Gaga,
where feelings of insecurity leads to eccentricity.

This is the day of Opus Dei,
where ordinary life par excellence leads us to holiness.

This is the day of Justin Bieber,
where confessions of a Belieber found its way on twitter.

This is the day of Contemporary Christian Music,
where pop music found its way into the steeple of a church.

This is the day of Korean drama,
where hulu.com picked up Coffee Prince, IRIS, and the Great Queen Seon Deok to its channel.

This is the day of Eastern appreciation,
where breathing with two lungs in the Body of Christ has been the hope for us all.

This is the day of Recession,
where foreclosure, unemployment, and the great recession enters our daily vocabulary.

This is the day of the "Reform of the Reform",
where Traditional Latin Mass found its way back into the Catholic church.

This is the day of the Scandal,
where one sexual abuse by the priest, is one too many.

This is the day of the year of priesthood,
where St. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney must have been interceding real hard for priesthood-sake.

This is the day of hope for unity,
where Anglicanorum Coetibus provides Anglicans to return to the Catholic faith.

This is the day of Post-Modern world,
where relativism and individualism pervades in all structures of life.

This is the day of Pope BXVI,
where his teachings cultivates the renewal of Augustinian model of believing in order to understand and understanding in order to believe.

This is the day of Juxtaposition,
where we are called to show that:

grace builds on nature.

we are not perfect.

Christ is our true hope.

in Him I live, and move, and am.

Happy birthday Church. You are the beauty, ever ancient, ever new. Let us begin. again.