Self Denial

In moral societies, with their rules and regulations, their hierarchies of power, people become self centred and self righteous. In moral societies love becomes an exchange, a power game, a gratification. How different is the love of the poor, the powerless, Christ himself.
The two great religions of post Christian England, Political Correctness and Islam, see no need for sacrificial love, no need for self denial. Even suicide bombers hope for gratification in the ever after.
Young people are indoctrinated into rights culture, self pity and seeing themselves as victims, passively buying and claiming whatever they can, all in a spirit of indignation and loathing, both of themselves and others they consider to be more fortunate.
This attitude pervades the modern Church. Churches often see themselves as branches of the social services, and rather than preaching the love and the freedom we have in Christ, share the same prejudices against Jews, bankers, capitalists, anyone who isn't mediocre, as the rest of the bureaucratic class.
These days, in Church services the stating point is usually the self rather than the Almighty, and God Himself is seen as a social worker, some kind of lifestyle coach.
In a vertical world where all is within the gift of the Bureaucracy, Christian faith is pretty hard to practice. To our ancestors, who lived in largely horizontal societies of mutual dependence, self denying love was the stuff of life. Christianity was as natural and obvious to them as the water they drank and the air they breathed.
But in the modern world, fragmented, atomized, the isolated individual, whose social relations consist of conformity and obedience, who has nothing to give, can know love only as gratification.
Such isolated individuals fill the Church. Such people fill the world. It is hard not to be one of them.
But the Church can still continue to proclaim the Gospel of God's great love, the self denying sacrifice of all men, which was once the right of all men, and light up the world with the sacrifice that has raised us up with him to eternal life.