Funny thing you should mention this, dear Brother A. The accent falls on "to be ready."
The Lord Christ had his forerunners, consecrated ones who prepared the way for His revelation to man.
Pre-eminently his brilliant cousin Saint John the Baptist "prepared the way," inaugurating the sacrament of baptism for the cleansing of sins, well before anyone then alive could have possibly imagined the spiritual significance of baptism by water, and even before there was Anyone in Whose Name anyone could have been baptized.
John constantly, faithfully proclaimed the coming of the Messiah. John ran ahead of Jesus, preparing, cultivating the human spirit to receive the Lord in common humanity, when He came.
Though there may be folks out there prepared to accuse me of blasphemy for saying it, I can't help but think of Plato as a type of forerunner of Christ in his own way, there to prepare the way of the Lord -- not in the field of spirit, but in the field of nous.
Unlike John's way -- the way of the Spirit -- Plato's way was the way of of the Mind -- of human reason. Since there is nothing "unreasonable" about the Christian faith, it's kind of nice to have had (putatively) Plato out there, effectively "preparing the Way" for the Lord, in the inimitable, uniquely Greek fashion. [Arguably, there has been no people in the history of mankind more remarkable for devotion to rational mind and its criteria than the ancient Hellenes.]
As you recall, it was the Greeks who were the most numerous early adherents of the Christian faith. And Christ's revelation was disseminated throughout the wider world via Hellenistic, not Jewish, culture.
I have to believe that God had a hand in all this. And that He chose the instruments of His purpose superlatively.
This is not to aver that one can come to the Lord via the route of reason alone, or even mainly. Faith, Hope, and Charity are the theological virtues that draw us close to God -- not our "problem-solving abilities."
Yet there seems to be nothing in Christianity that confounds or delegitimates human reason at all. Quite the contrary.
Most of the sheer irrationality I see in this world today seems to stem from implacable resistance to, even positive hatred of, the idea of reason. Probably because the apostate of God realizes, deep down in his bones, that there can be no such thing as reason, without reference to an abiding standard by which reason itself can be measured and found to be "reasonable."
But this sort of thing regularly manages to pass itself off as an "unheard-of demand" these days....
And that's why the human race seems to be in such a quandary in the present era: Irrational people constitute the socially (and politically) effective people in the present socio-political culture.
In our era, they are stacked up like cord wood in our most prestigious institutions of higher learning, the elite foundations and organs of mass communication; and in the movers and shakers of the political class.
And they seem to be dedicated to making the lives of "the rest of us" perfectly miserable.
On that happy note, I must say good-night, Arlen. Time for some sleep! Thank you so much for writing. Pleasant dreams -- Good night!