The important thing is that we should keep on looking
for our own answers. I heard this
said somewhere the other day and it made me think.
Our education is built up of a wealth of knowledge and
experience, which is transmitted to us in our childhood by grown-ups with whom
we come in contact, in our family, people we meet outside, and those we meet
when we start our more formal education in school. All these are people we look
to for answers to our questions as we grow up sooner, or later however, we all
want to look for our own answers: we will indeed in this way often come up with
the right answers, but there will be many other times we will find we could
have found the answers more easily and with more chance of being right, by
simply asking someone with more experience of the particular subject we are
interested in..
It is with good reason that most of our congregations in
church nowadays are a bit long in the tooth. The plain truth is that people up
to a certain age are usually too busy living, to spare more than a casual
thought about dying; but sooner or later nothing is more certain than
that everyone will come face to face with death and the older we get the more
likely it is. Some amongst us may indeed already had one or more near misses
and have been brought face to face with the realities of existence, and some
will also have lost loved ones. So it is not to be wondered at that we think
far more deeply about questions of life and death as we get older and often we
come round to relying on our faith to provide least some of the answers for us.
Unfortunately it is difficult to tell the young the reason
why we attach so much importance to our faith until they have their own life’s
experience to learn from. The younger we are in fact more we tend to think we
know all the answers about the meaning of life because of the way religious
education is taught in classes in school. But the young would be as well also
to be seeking for answers about religion elsewhere, from people who know what
it is like to live life as a Christian, rather than just learning it all from
their teachers, and indeed knowledge about all religions is
important, but having said that, it is even more important to remember that
those of us who go church, even some of the younger ones amongst us, know a
thing or two more than most when it comes to the real meaning of faith, after
all we practice it and experience it ourselves: which is more than be said for
many school teachers, for whom religious knowledge is just another item on the
curriculum and not a matter of personal faith.
So although in fact, it is important
to keep on looking for answers,
is it is also important that we sit quietly and think about things for
ourselves too. We might well come to realise that things are not always as cut
and dried as they appear and find a need to look out of the world we
live in and look elsewhere for something or someone to lean on, someone
who will provide some real answers for us--- someone not of this world
but someone we call ‘Son of God’.