One of this week’s Best of the Week moments on The Inner Life began with a simple invitation: Where do you find wonder? Guest Father Spencer Howe pointed listeners to G.K. Chesterton’s novel Man Alive as a wake-up call to stop trying to escape our lives and start trying to live them again.
Father Spencer described the concept as “rediscovering the gift” of our own circumstances: our state in life, our family, our work, and the daily routines that can feel repetitive. And then he named the hope at the heart of it: “the life we have is good, even with the challenges, even with the things that might seem to be gray and dull.”
Colby, a former Calvinist now in OCIA, called in to share how Catholic teaching has changed the way he sees himself and the Christian life. He said, “We all have the ability to become saints,” and added that he finds wonder in “the Church itself, the mysteries, the Bible and its completion.” He said discove it made him feel like a child again, like he was entering his father’s house again in the purest form of wonderment.
Father Spencer affirmed the Church’s hopeful vision of the human person. To him, it’s “not one of total depravity, but of a wounded nature that can be healed by grace.” He added, “It elevates our nature so that our faculties of intellect and will and even our passions and appetites can be directed to the good.”
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