One of the other reasons I love this time of year is that I can have fires in the fire place. I love getting the kids in bed, making a fire, turning off the TV and turning on some music while I read. I'm still in the midst of The Holy Longing: The Search for A Christian Spirituality by Ronald Rolheiser, constantly being struck by this book in so many ways.

In particular, I keep coming back to his idea of the church as a family, drawing the same kind of commitments that a family brings with it. Rolheiser uses a picture of a conscriptive rope that connects us to the church that resonates with me:

It is one which we may let go of after we have accepted it. Ecclesial commitment does not work that way. One does not keep an exit visa in his or her back pocket and, consciously or unconsciously, emotionally blackmail the family he or she belongs to with the attitude: "I will stay with you as long as I deem you worth it or until you radically disappoint me!" The church has always that, and rightly so, that baptism is irrevocable, that it leaves an indelible mark on the soul. Anyone who has ever had a child knows exactly what that means; when you hold your child for the first time it scars your soul indelibly.

Any covenant commitment, if authentic, does precisely that; it locks us in. Like a mother who has given birth to a child or a couple who have promised lifelong fidelity to each other, we cannot opt in and out of the church as fits our mood and phases of growth. As long as we do not understand this, we are still, in terms of ecclesiology, a child or an adolescent who needs to be carried, as opposed to an adult who is helping to take responsibility for carrying our family.

I was also struck today by the contrast between the ideas of charity and social justice:

Charity is about giving a hungry person some bread, while justice is about trying to change the system so that nobody has excess bread while some have none; charity is about treating your neighbors with respect; while justice is about trying to get at the deeper roots of racism...

He takes it deeper in terms of the motivation behind that justice:

Thus, for a Christian, the ultimate motivation in working for justice may never be simple ideology, irrespective of how noble that particular ideology may appear. Rather both the truth that inspires the quest for justice and the energy that fuels it must ground themselves in something beyond any ideology. Ultimate, both justice and our motivation for seeking it must be grounded in the equality of all human persons before God and in our respect for nature as also being God's child. Any motivation for justice that grounds itself simply in liberal ideology or in indignation and anger at inequality will ultimately not change the world's heart, even when it manages to change some of it's structures.

I know this stuff's probably horribly boring to read out of context. I'm writing this more for myself. I'm trying to put the pieces of this stuff together in my head as I write it out, as I try and understand how this is breaking down some of my world view.