Forgotten Vision

Below is a quote from Metropolitan John Zizioulas. It reminded me of a homily given by my own bishop, Bishop Mitrohan.  It was on the Sunday of All Saints and he noted how at that particular season of graduation parties, as this Sunday tends to fall in June, we celebrate our children finishing high school and going off to college. We hear of all the different things children want to be. One wants to be a doctor, another an engineer, a teacher, lawyer, accountant. What we should really want our children to motivate themselves to be, however, is a good Christian.

The term “saint” or “sanctity” is something entirely irrelevant and foreign to our time, and to the civilization and the quests of contemporary Man. Which parents nowadays have the ambition of making their children “saints”? Which of our schools and educational programs cultivate sanctity or present it as a vision and as a model? The “successful” person of our time, as well as the ideal of contemporary education and our civilization is not in the least the “good and benevolent” person of classical times. Instead, it is the one who can achieve wealth, comforts and social emergence – this is what parents want of their children, this is what our educational systems chiefly aspire to, this is what the mass media cultivate, and this is the dream of the majority of our young generation. Indeed, in a society that regards unemployment as its most serious problem and is governed by the anxiety of how to increase its per capita income, for one to speak of saints and sanctity constitutes a challenge – or rather, a cause for laughter and derision. In this way, sanctity has now become a “forgotten vision”.