Viewpoints
25 December 0001
By +Oscar V. Cruz, JCD
TIME means many things to many people. And among other things, time counts its moment-to-moment passage in terms of minutes and hours, in forms of days, months, and years. Time also serves to note and remember memorable if not horrible events that happened in the course of history – which itself marks time. Furthermore, birthdays, anniversaries, and other events are all in the realm of time. In fact, the mere mention of past, present, and future are necessarily time-bound.
Following the Gregorian calendar – which is used practically all over the world, in all parts of the globe – Christ was born on 25 December 0001. If He were still on earth to this time, Christ would be now some 2014 years old. And this brings to mind the Church He founded upon Peter – the rock – having practically the same age. And that Church is still be around and will definitely continue to be around to accompany humankind as this follows the course of time until man is gone and until time is thus ended for him – with the thought hat only God has no end.
And this bring to mind a rather good number of churches, sects, and religious denominations founded but by human persons – with good will, with conviction, with sincerity or otherwise. They have some striking common denominators especially in terms of the following:
1. Their founders appear rather late in the day such that their own parents and grandparents were already usually dead and were therefore not covered by the supposedly saving power of their own pious foundations.
2. The foundations come and go, appear and disappear with their founders, the occasion of whose deaths makes their avid followers put up their own respective religious denominations, one independently of the other.
3. The thus founded churches, sects, and denominations suffer either painful division if not eventual disappearance when they are subject to inheritance in favor of the close family members of the founders – one after another – who usually become envious of one another as well primarily due to the money equivalents plus financial benefits of such foundations vis-à-vis the capacity or incapacity of this or that their to manage the religious foundations concerned. History is the best witness to this phenomenon. Many are the churches, sects, and denominations that appeared and disappeared in the course of time. And many other are coming and going as well in due time.
All the above observations made are not in any way meant to argue against this or that church, sect, or religious denomination, or in anyway intended to belittle any of them. It is but simply telling the truth. And the ground reality is that “Truth will set us free!”
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