Having Christ as Our Cornerstone

A Christian, who will have built his life upon the cornerstone who is Christ, has his own personality, his own way of seeing the world and its happenings. He has a scale of values very different from that of the pagan, who does not live by faith and who has a purely worldly conception of things. A weak and lukewarm Christian faith, however, which exerts very little influence on ordinary life, can provoke in some people that kind of inferiority complex which manifests itself in an immoderate desire to "humanize" Christianity, to "popularize" the Church, to make it somehow seem to conform to the value-judgments prevalent in the world at a given time (J. Orlandis).

That is why, as well as being immersed in our secular activities, as Christians we need to be immersed in God, through prayer, the sacraments and the sanctification of our daily work. We need to be faithful disciples of Jesus in the middle of the world, in our ordinary everyday life, with all the constant effort and hard decisions this entails. In this way we will be able to put into practice the advice Saint Paul gave to the first Christians in Rome when he alerted them to the risks of accommodating themselves to the pagan customs of the day: Do not be conformed to this world (Rom 12:2). Sometimes this refusal to conform will lead us to row against the current and run the risk of being misunderstood by many of our contemporaries. The Christian must not forget that he is leaven (Matt 13:33) hidden in the lump of dough that has to be fermented by him...

Jesus of Nazareth continues to be the cornerstone of every man's life. Any building constructed without Christ is raised in vain. Let us think as we finish our prayer, whether the Faith we profess is coming to bear more and more influence on our existence, on the way we view the world and mankind, and on the way we behave.

In Conversation With God Vol 3

Tags: Catholicism, Christianity