Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

The other day I read an article about a man who died having refused vaccines until it was too late. He was a good man by all accounts. A loving father. Active in his community. Generous and good humored.

On social media, where it was posted, hundreds of people clicked a “laugh” reaction to the story. Hundreds of people read a story about a man who leaves a grieving family, who loved, served, worked, and dreamed just like them — and then they decided their reaction was to laugh at this death.

We’re losing a sense of plain decency — of the moral concept of loving our neighbor as ourselves. Part of the problem is, I think, that I’m not sure how many people love themselves. I think there’s a collapse of real joy, meaning, identity, and purpose in our society without which it’s hard to have much self-worth — let alone a realistic respect for the dignity of every human being.

Perhaps the greatest gift we could give one another this Christmas season is to recover the real and deep awareness that God himself chose these mortal, human bodies as a fit place to dwell for a time. He became our neighbor. A foster son of a carpenter, born in a dusty backwater, and raised in a no-account village. His was the kind of early life it would be easy to laugh off as inconsequential.

Yet God arrived with the full force of the majesty of an infant to free us from sin and death — and to make us heirs of an everlasting promise. That promise is that he is the way — and it is a way on which we’ll find few who are so quick to laugh at the death of a stranger.

My grandmother used to cross herself every time she heard of a death of a stranger or friend alike. We need more of that now — more quick prayers for the departed and fewer quick laughs at their expense.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert