New Wine, old wineskins

         "...The first Christians were well aware that everything happening in them and among them - the new and exceptional compared with the lives they had led before, the revolutionary compared with the lives so many others around them were leading - was not the fruit of their adherence, of their intelligence, or of their will, but a gift of the spirit, a gift from on high, a mysterious energy with which they were invested."   Luigi Giussani, Why the Church?  p.89

Just like what makes us Christians so different from everybody else around us today, right? Of course not. The newness of the Christ event doesn't come through to so many of us Christians today because we are old wine skins,  and Christ is always  New Wine. With our set ways of thinking and feeling inside secure Comfort Zones we reduce Him to sentiments, ideas, rules, and acceptable norms that cannot contain Him. And if perchance, by a miracle of grace, He does slip inside, how furious we get when He bursts the wine skin apart.