Reading...

...Christ our Joy: The Theological Vision of Pope Benedict XVI  by Mgr Joseph Murphy. It's a delight: readable, and inspiring.

The book includes BXVI's insights on freedom, liturgy, prayer, love, and our nature as children of God. He is particularly interesting on the whole notion of how worship of God, and getting this priority right, is what gives dignity to man and ensures his rights and security. Understanding this is central - and to understand it properly we must go ack to the Old Testament and understand God's covenant with his people...

Benedict/Ratzinger explains that love is the key to understanding what God is all about."God is the Lord of all things because he is their creator, and only therefore can we pray to him. For this means that freedom and love are not ineffectual ideas but rather that they are sustaining forces of reality." (Ratzinger In the beginning).   Because of this, love "gives us the courage to keep on living, and it empowers us, comforted thereby, to take upon ourselves the adventure of life".

In today's  often Godless Britain, the number of suicides is increasing, especially among the young. We need to show them the joy that Chrst came to bring.Summing up Benedict's message on this, Murphy writes:"We can know that it is truly a gift to be human only when we realise that we are not prodcuts of chance but that there is Someone who freely produced us out of love."