A THEOLOGY OF HOME

A Theology of Home

Home. It is a magical word that resonates with all of us. Even those from broken homes, or homes that no longer exist, there is still something in the idea that is sought after. Home is that place where we are meant to be safe, nurtured, known for who we are, to freely live and love.

Home’s universal appeal populates culture. Take Me Home, Country Road, Sweet Home Alabama, and I’ll Be Home for Christmas are a few songs that invoke the theme. Movies and literature end happily with protagonists, like Odysseus, finally going home. The entire goal of the American pass-time of baseball is to be safe at home. YouTube videos of joyful homecomings fill up our social media feeds and we spend billions of dollars constructing and decorating our own houses, turning them into Home Sweet Home.

Our homes are the great theatre where the drama of our lives unfolds, as G.K. Chesterton eloquently said:

The place where babies are born, where men die, where the drama of mortal life is acted, is not an office or a shop or a bureau. It is something much smaller in size and much larger in scope. And while nobody would be such a fool as to pretend that it is the only place where people should work, or even the only place where women should work, it has a character of unity and universality that is not found in any of the fragmentary experiences of the division of labour.

Home, by its nature, foreshadows heaven. Pope Saint John Paul II’s final words in this life were “Let me go to the house of the Father.” He wanted to go home – to the home that all of us are willed by God to go to, even if he allows our own will to lead us somewhere else.

Ironically, despite the innate human desire that there is for home, the notion that someone would actually want to make a home, providing a place of safety, love, cleanliness, order, education, and care, has fallen out of favor. Could there be, in the minds of millions of women today, anything worse than being a “homemaker”?

In the 1960s, women left home. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan articulated an idea that resonated with millions of Western women: “the ache that has no name.” When Friedan and her feminist friends asked, “Is this all there is?” they assumed the answer was “yes.” In their female frenzy to escape home, the elite narrative became that women should offer a collective non serviam, a resounding “no” to serving their families, their children, or any future but their own.

Wendell Berry captured some of the illogic of liberated women when he asked: “Why would any woman who would refuse, properly, to take the marital vow of obedience (on the ground, presumably, that subservience to a mere human being is beneath human dignity) then regard as ‘liberating’ a job that puts her under the authority of a boss (man or woman) whose authority specifically requires and expects obedience?”

Women following the downward stream of the culture haven’t yet realized that the general malaise or malcontent felt by 1960s housewives is the same emptiness they feel now. Feminism hasn’t led women to happiness, just to more searching, grasping, transitioning, with the next best thing around the corner. What they don’t know is that no career, string of lovers, exotic trips to Bali, or Louis Vuitton handbags will fill this gap.

In the meantime, children became the enemy, preventing women from fulfilling their dreams. Abortion became a necessity. The number of children lost through abortion is staggering. As the Vietnam War came to an end, casualties of that war – 58,220 U.S. servicemen total – were dwarfed by this new kind of killing, mothers killing their own children (60 million and counting, 3000 daily). Abortion is by far the number one cause of death in the United States annually, outpacing heart disease and cancer.

What happens, then, when you have generations of people that have willfully killed their own children through abortion? The Medievals were against abortion because it takes an innocent life, but also because they knew it was mortally damaging to the human soul. It isn’t just a child that dies in an abortion, but something in the mother and the father dies as well.

As St. Thomas Aquinas said, bonum est diffusivum sui, the good spreads itself out. The opposite is also true: evil spreads itself out. This grave evil has reached into every area of familial life.

It is any wonder, then, that our spiritual home, the Church, seems to be crumbling from the core? When the fundamental piece of society — the family — has been shredded, it shouldn’t surprise us to see similar fallout in the Church. We expect bishops to know better, and to be holy and good, but they too are a product of our torn-asunder culture.

This doesn’t absolve them of their crimes, but at least helps us to understand how those entrusted with the care of so many souls could respond with gross malfeasance. When some women can view the destruction of their children as a social rite of passage to join the “sisterhood,” it isn’t too far of a leap to see that bishops could abandon their spiritual children to join the “brotherhood.”

“There are two ways of getting home,” Chesterton explained, “One of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.”

We are a culture that needs to reclaim the home, having looked the world over for happiness. Radical feminists, although they have looked high and low, still have “that ache that cannot be defined.” Their restless hearts are a God ache, which will remain until they make their way back Home again.

EUCHARIST AND EVANGELISATION

                         THE EUCHARIST AND EVANGELISATION

We know that the Eucharist is the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise in Matthew 28 that He would be with us “until the end of the world.” And certainly, the presence of Jesus by itself is consoling beyond measure to those who believe in Him. The Eucharist, however, is not only about Our Lord’s presence but also about His action. As St. John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia:

The Church has received the Eucharist from Christ her Lord not as one gift – however precious – among so many others, but as the gift par excellence, for it is the gift of himself, of his person in his sacred humanity, as well as the gift of his saving work.

Jesus makes Himself present in the Eucharist, and He continues His saving and life-giving work in the Eucharist. His sacrifice becomes sacramentally present at every Mass. He allows Himself to be handled and distributed by the Church’s priests and other ministers so that His faithful might receive Him. Once received, He works on us from within, transforming us and drawing us into closer intimacy with Himself. And even as we adore Him, when He seems most passive, He is silently active, drawing our hearts to Himself and teaching us the wisdom of God.

The work of Jesus—His self-giving for the life of the world—is to become our work as well. The French Bishop Dominique Rey once wrote in a book about the Eucharist and evangelization, “Prayer commits us to radicalizing our relationship with Christ.” Bishop Rey added, “Eucharistic Adoration is a school of fervour. In contemplating the Eucharistic Jesus, given so that the world might have life, we are invited to give our own life in return, to Christ and to our brothers.”

Jesus gives His flesh for the life of the world, and we are to give our flesh for the life of the world. We can trace the saying “a pound of flesh” back to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (4:1), in which the lender Shylock insists upon receiving the pound of flesh promised him in payment for a loan made to Antonio. Portia, advocating for Antonio, responds that Shylock may have it but without an ounce of blood, since blood had not been promised. So Portia outwits Shylock by making the payment impossible. In this story, the demands of a sinful world meet with a correspondingly shrewd response. In the story of our salvation, Jesus pays the price of our redemption with both His flesh and His blood, and He calls us to imitate His self-emptying love.

It goes without saying that our imitation is not easy. And we are all-too-aware these days of the destruction wrought by our failure to love. The sex abuse crisis is very much rooted in a self-centred distortion of love, one which is so extreme that those who give in to it would even destroy another person’s life in order to satisfy the corrupt desires of the flesh. That is the very opposite of Christ’s sacrifice of His flesh “for the life of the world.”

Yes, living Christ’s love is difficult. It requires that we suffer with perseverance. There are many crosses to bear in this life, many situations we find especially trying, whether we are tried spiritually, psychologically, physically, or in any other way. But one lesson we can all draw from this shameful chapter in the history of the Church here in the United States is that the love of Christ is the only true love, the only love that can save us.

Also, our moments of suffering in love are times when the Eucharistic Jesus can reveal to us, if we let Him, that His “yoke is easy and (His) burden light” (Matthew 11:30). Jesus comes to us every time we celebrate Holy Mass and gives us strength through our union with Him. We also draw close to each other every day, the distances between us melting away in the mystical nearness that happens when we all draw close to the Eucharistic Lord. In the Eucharist we are equipped by God to do the saving work of Jesus, to love what frail nature often loathes, and to lay down our lives in sacrifice not in some hypothetical future, but in whatever “here and now” we find ourselves.

We may feel alone during difficult times, but every time we see the Blessed Sacrament, we remember that we are never alone. In the Incarnation God has come to live with us, and He is never going away. By making His flesh and blood sacramentally present to us, Jesus makes good on His promise to remain with us always.

The fulfilment of Christ’s promise is a tremendous consolation to us, but here we also have a challenge. “Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give,” Jesus says in Matthew 10:8. In Luke 6:38, He says, “Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” We are not mere consumers at a kind of heavenly Walmart. We receive the consolation of Jesus in large part so that we will be ready to share His consolation, to bring the presence and love of Christ to everyone we meet.

There was a spate of ecclesiastical documents on the Holy Eucharist in the early-to-middle years of the last decade, which in some ways culminated in the 2007 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Benedict XVI, entitled Sacramentum Caritatis, the “Sacrament of Charity.” The special focus of several of these writings was on the link between the Eucharist and the mission of the Church, which is to share Christ and His saving Gospel.

The Eucharist reveals God’s existence and presence among us. The Eucharist continues the work of redemption in Jesus Christ. The Eucharist is a model of humility. The Eucharist is our food for the journey from earth to heaven. The Eucharist is the fuel of evangelization and the reception of the Eucharist by new members of the faithful is the summit of that to which evangelization aspires. In all of this, the Eucharist is the Sacrament of Charity, because “God is love” (1 John 4:8), Jesus is God, and the Eucharist is Jesus here with us. And the Eucharist is also the Sacrament of Charity because the Sacrament strengthens us in charity, calling us to join Jesus in giving our flesh, making a sacrifice of our lives, for the life of the world.

MUSIC LEADS TO GOD

                  How Music Leads to God

Music does inexplicable things to us. The hills are alive with the sound of music. Music moves us. It sways us and causes us to tap our fingers or bop our heads as we listen to the rhythm and beat of that Drake’s “In My Feelings” hip-hop hit.  Music has the power to transport our minds and imaginations to another time or place. Music heals us. It helps ease our pain and our hurts. The ancient Greek philosophers believed that music served a therapeutic purpose. Today’s science gives us the evidence that it’s true. Many of us have probably heard of the “Mozart effect.” One study found that Mozart’s Piano Sonata in D Major decreased epileptiform activity in patients even in comatose state. Music therapy has now become a well-known practice in helping not only make us feel good but also in the treatment of different disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, memory loss, traumatic brain injury, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Music shields us from bad, harmful stuff. In ancient Israel, when Saul was being tormented by a harmful spirit, he asked his servants to seek out a man who is skilful in playing the lyre. They brought in David to be at his service. “And when the harmful spirit from God was upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand. Saul was refreshed and was well, and the harmful spirit departed from him” (1 Samuel 16:23).

Music changes us and transforms us. It changes our mood from sad to happy or even from happy to sad. Music brings us joy and sometimes move us to tears. It lifts up the spirit. As Plato said, “music is an art imbued with the power to penetrate into the very depths of the soul.”

We have always known that music has profound effects on us physically, cognitively, emotionally, and spiritually. Ancient civilizations knew the role of music in our lives. The Ancient Greek philosophers philosophized about it. Many verses in the Old Testament refer to music, singing, and playing the stringed instruments. In battles that date back to the earliest part of human history, music was used to inspire and energize the warriors. During the American Civil War, there are accounts of the use of music to aid in the healing of the wounded soldiers.

Music Touches Body and Soul

We’ve always known that music has the power to impact our daily lives but it’s only in recent decades, through advances in modern science and technology, that we have captured, imaged, and measured the evidence of the complexities of the impact of music on us.

Music touches our lives in fascinating ways. One important window in our lives where music profoundly impacts us is our developmental years, particularly during our teenage years going into our early 20s when we are firming up our sense of identity. Our teenage years going into our early 20s is a period of restless exploration and rapid development and the music that enters our lives during this period gets embedded in those neural wirings, staying in our memory for the rest of our lives.

Musical nostalgia, according to the latest scientific research and findings, is real. Hearing those songs again brings back all kinds of emotional memories, including heartaches, love, exhilaration, individual expression, passion, happiness, anger, hatred, and frustration.

Music is a gift. It’s a wonderful gift. We offer back this gift to our Creator also as a gift by our singing and praising. Music, with our voices singing, our ears listening, and hands creating music, enables us to physically express the spiritual joy of our heart. Music has the power to bring the mind, body, and spirit in unison as we reach out to God.

MAN OF GOD

"What does it mean to be a man of God?"  “Man of God” is the description given to a man that follows God in every way, who obeys His commands with joy, who does not live for the things of this life but for the things of eternity, who willingly serves his God in giving freely of all his resources yet gladly suffers as a consequence of his faith. Perhaps Micah 6:8 sums up the man of God in one neat verse: “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” The man of God does not swindle or defraud his employer by turning up late for work or spending an hour on the internet during work hours; he doesn’t gossip or slander; he keeps his mind and heart pure by guarding his eyes and ears from the filth of the world; he is the spiritual leader of his family. He does everything opposite to what the world does or approves of; he goes "against the grain" of society because he knows these things displease God; he considers those who are "disadvantaged" or those rejected by society, those that are lonely or despairing; he is a listener to other people’s problems and does not judge. Most of all, the man of God understands that when our Lord commanded him to "be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48), he is only able to accomplish that because God enables him to be “holy and blameless in his sight” (Ephesians 1:4) through His power and the indwelling of His Spirit. On our own, we are incapable of holiness and perfection, but through Christ who strengthens us, we can "do all things" (Philippians 4:13). The man of God knows that his new nature is that of the righteousness of Christ which was exchanged for our sinful nature at the cross (2 Corinthians 5:17; Philippians 3:9). The final result is that he walks humbly with his God, knowing that he must rely solely upon Him to be able to live to the full and persevere to the end. Perhaps the Christian today is lacking in these qualities, but this is what simple religion is all about—the simple religion that is yet sufficient to please God: helping those in distress and keeping oneself from being polluted by the world (James 1:23). We can have an awareness of all biblical doctrines, we can know all the theological terms, we may be able to translate the Bible from the original Greek and so on, but the principle of Micah 6:8 is the principle that the man of God must follow: act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Recommended Resource: The Making of a Man of God: Lessons from the Life of David by Alan Redpath

OLD HERESIES NEVER DIE

Old Heresies Never Die

Old Christian heresies never die.  Nor do they quite fade away.  They linger on in an underground way.  They continue to be believed by otherwise good Christians who don’t realize they are holding on to an old heresy.

 Monophysites believed that Jesus had a divine nature, but they were not at all convinced that he had a human nature. He was God, but he was not man. He was only pretending to be human.

They were also Pelagians.  They believed that we could be good if only we tried hard enough.  They didn’t honestly believe in the Augustinian idea – the Catholic idea – that we are unable to perform a single good deed without the grace of God.

Or take the ancient Manichean heresy, which Saint Augustine was attached to for a number of years.  The Manicheans believed that there are two fundamental powers (or gods) locked in an everlasting struggle, a good God (purely spiritual) versus a bad God (purely material).  If you were a good person you tried to help the good God, and if you were a bad person you tried to help the bad God.  And, of course, you expected that the God of your choice would, in turn, help you.

My guess is that the witches who abounded in the late middle ages were latter-day Manicheans who had decided to serve on the side of the bad God, hoping that their God (the Devil) would help them in their many earthly concerns.  Of course, they didn’t realize they were de facto Manicheans.  How could they, being poor and uneducated?  Jesus, as they saw things, was on the side of respectable people.  So they had little choice but to turn to the Devil.

Today, in the Catholic world (or at least in the American Catholic world), the old heresy that flourishes underground and unwittingly is that of Marcion. He was born in the Greek city of Sinope (in Asia Minor, on the Black Sea) about AD 85 and died about AD 160 in Rome, where he had been excommunicated from the Church.

Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were two quite different Gods.  The God of the OT wasn’t exactly an evil God.  Instead, he was a God of justice, and therefore it was his duty to punish the many sins of humanity with the pain and suffering we deserve.  This was the God of the Jews.  He was a material God.  It was this OT God who created the world, this world of sin and misery.

In the Marcionite view, the God of the NT, by contrast, is a God of mercy.  In keeping with his loving, merciful nature, this higher and better God does not punish sin. He forgives sin.  He is the father of Jesus Christ.  He is a purely spiritual (nonmaterial) being.  And so is Jesus, who only appears to have a human body.  This NT God saves us from the miseries of this lower world; he brings us to heaven.

Marcion denied that there is any continuity between Christianity and the religion of the Jews.  He rejected the Old Testament, for he thought it a book about the inferior, material God of justice.  He even rejected portions of the New Testament.  He accepted (with a few redactions) the Gospel of Luke and ten of the Pauline epistles.  Everything else, bearing traces of the Jewish OT God, he tossed out.

I’m not saying that there are Catholics today who embrace the whole of Marcion’s theology.  No, but there are many who embrace his central point, namely that the true God is a God of pure mercy, not a God of justice.  The true God forgives sins, he doesn’t punish them.

It’s not only Catholics who embrace this heresy.  Modern persons generally embrace it.  Those of us with a modern mind find it hard to bear the thought that anybody goes to Hell.  Well, maybe Hitler and Stalin.  And even they should not be kept there for eternity.  After – say – ten thousand years, they should be set free.

And among Catholics, it is not only rank-and-file Catholics who think God is a God of mercy-but-not-justice.  A few years back Pope Francis established a Year of Mercy.  Will he soon declare a Year of Justice – a year in which to remind ourselves of the ancient teaching of the Church and the Bible, that the God of Christianity is a God who punishes sin?

Pope Francis, as he demonstrated in Amoris Laetitia, wants mercy to be shown to divorced-and-remarried Catholics.  And as he demonstrated in his recent amendment to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he wants mercy to be shown to those who commit horrible murders.

And as he demonstrated in his revocation of the restrictions imposed by Pope Benedict on Cardinal McCarrick, he wants mercy to be shown to homosexual prelates who have inflicted immeasurable harm on the Church.

Old heresies, as I say, never quite die.

                       Truly and Fully Human

We have been created for union with God: our spiritual life is important. We have been created in the image and likeness of God: our emotions are part of this reality, willed by God to help us be more fully present to ourselves, to the world around us, and to him. Our spirituality, our emotionality, our reason, and our will do not operate to their fullest extent in isolation, but when working together.

The idea that we can isolate our own faith and spiritual life from our human emotions and instincts is a philosophical fiction. There is no moment, as human persons, in which we are only thinking, or operating in the intellectual sphere, any more than there is a moment in which we are only feeling.

Reason alone has no way of knowing or perceiving reality. It is presented with valuable information through our physical senses. Our emotions present it with valuable information as well, regarding non-physical, but no less real dimensions of what is going on both inside us and around us.

Our emotions are also a way God can communicate with us from within. We believe that we are temples of the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Trinity dwells within us. If our emotions are able to put us more fully in touch with the core of our being, it makes sense that, in so doing, they are able to connect us more deeply with the God who dwells in us.

If we are able to be in touch with and rightly understand our feelings, they will provide us with needed insight into what aspects of our life are drawing us closer to God and what aspects are pulling us away from him. Over time, by fine tuning our ability to feel and understand our emotions, we can become increasing more adept and sensitive to the ways God reveals himself to us in daily life.

How can we bring about an integration of emotion and spirituality in our own life?

One way is to start by just being more aware of your emotions and letting yourself truly feel them. This means focusing on 1) how you are feeling 2) why you are feeling that way and 3) what your feelings are telling you about yourself, or about your perception of another person or situation. This is a simple way of becoming more in tune with your emotions, which can bring great insight.

An understanding and connectedness with our emotions can also transform the way we pray. Incorporating music, writing and art into our prayer can help integrate our emotions. So can exploring how our environment (images, sounds, places) influences our prayer experience. Timing matters too: praying in the morning can be a different experience from praying midday and praying at night. Understanding our emotions can help us discern when and where to pray, and identify what thoughts and desires to bring to prayer. Personalizing our prayer is not meant to replace liturgical worship or traditional formulated prayers, but to expand our prayer beyond set times of worship, remaining connected to God throughout our day and involving our entire selves in doing so.

There is also a strong connection between emotions and virtue. Emotions are neither good nor bad in themselves, but our response to them can take on a moral character. Emotions can become a significant source of positive motivation that encourages virtuous behavior. Wonder and awe before nature and other aspects of life can lead us to a greater sense of reverence for the God who created all. Dignity and a sense of repulsion at injustice can culminate in virtues of charity and mercy. Emotions of gratitude, satisfaction, fulfilment and peace can bring us to a greater awareness of God’s presence and action in our lives.

RELIGION AND RITUALS

RELIGION AND RITUALS
Sometimes we hear people running down the concept of religion. “Jesus didn’t come to bring us a religion,” they say, “but he wants to have a relationship with us.” Other times, we hear people say they are “spiritual” but not “religious.” Both of these are based on an impoverished understanding of what religion is — as if it simply consisted of unimportant rituals or arbitrary doctrines.

But real religion involves neither of these. It doesn’t contain arbitrary doctrines, but truths that have been revealed by God. It also involves genuine relationships with God, with Christ and with our fellow human beings.

Thus St. James tells us that “religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” Having a real relationship with God means not only loving him, but loving our neighbors, as well — especially our less fortunate neighbors.

Yet it is possible to become too focused on external rituals. This happened with Jesus’ critics, who faulted his disciples for not washing their hands before they ate, in violation of the custom of their day. But this custom was not based on God’s teaching. It isn’t found in the Mosaic Law. Jesus thus rebuked his critics for “teaching as doctrines human precepts.”

Like the prophets before him, Jesus made it clear that moral values take precedence over mere ritual observances: “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within, and they defile.”

This is not to say that rituals are unimportant. Ritual appears in every culture, showing that it’s built into human nature. Thus God gave Israel rituals alongside moral commandments in the Old Testament Law. This Law was a model of wisdom for the people of the ancient Near East, and by observing it, the Israelites would show “wisdom and intelligence to the nations, who will hear of all these statutes and say, ‘This great nation is truly a wise and intelligent people.’”

God has ordained different rituals for us today, but ritual — together with the moral imperatives that flow from the ethic of love — is an important part of how we relate to God.

Rather than talking down religion, we should recognize and embrace the concept, for it is a biblical one. In doing so, we should embrace the impulse for ritual that God built into human nature, but we should also recognize the transcendent importance of love. This is taught in both the Old and the New Testaments. When Jesus identified the first and second great commandments as love of God and love of neighbor, he was quoting from the Law of Moses.

We thus should “be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.” And we always should strive to be one who “walks blamelessly and does justice; who thinks the truth in his heart,” for “whoever does these things shall never be disturbed.”

THERE IS A GOD AND I AM NOT HM

THERE IS A GOD AND I AM NOT HIM

The world is filled with trouble.  Every day brings us reports of violence, strife, attacks on churches, floods, disaster, and death.  It would be easy to conclude that God does not exist, that what we call “God” is merely a dream, an idealized picture of a being we wish existed but doesn’t.

And yet through it all – through all the doubts and troubles and distress – we need to keep repeating to ourselves:  There is a God.  And He is watching out for us.  His loving providence covers every contingency.  He has a plan.  And He will not forsake us.

And thus we can have hope – hope that, in the end, good will win out over evil, whether it is the evil in the world or the evil in our own hearts; hope that every tear will be washed away and all God’s people will rejoice; hope that our struggles and sacrifices now, even if they seem pointless, will be meaningful.

What can give us confidence that this is so?  For Christians, it is their faith in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The God who can bring good out of the torture and death of His own Son can bring good out of anything.

“All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well,” Julian of Norwich assures us in her Thirteenth Revelation of Divine Love, a famous passage quoted by T. S. Eliot in Little Gidding, the last of his Four Quartets.

So off we go, to “do good,” to “fight the good fight,” “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”  And before long, we begin to notice, not only our own sinfulness but also our limitations.

Have you ever gone to Mass and looked at the faces of the other people, kneeling there, praying devotedly for the dozens of things they need so desperately the way you do for the dozens of things you so desperately need?

Have you looked at them and said, “I can’t even begin to fathom all the hopes and joys and fears within even this one person, let alone the hundreds in this church”?  Then you walk out into the street pass by even more people.  You look into their faces and see concern and worry or hope mixed with fear, desire mixed with uncertainty, love mixed with anger, and you wonder how you could possibly help all these people.

Crime rages in the city; lust and greed ravage people’s lives; disease and death take people we know and love.  And what can we do?  Not much. We are like the Apostles on that hill looking out at the 5,000, holding a few measly pieces of bread and some fish, saying to themselves:  “This isn’t going to be anywhere near enough!”

It is then that we need to keep repeating to ourselves the second important truth:  “There is a God, and I am not Him.”  When it all seems “too much,” we need to remember that God does not expect us to be Him.  We are called to love and serve the people God sends our way.  But we are not responsible for taking care of the world. Only God is big enough to do that.

The Good Samaritan was not able to stop crime in his nation or even on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.  But he was able to pick up the half-dead Jewish man he encountered along the road and care for him.  Mother Teresa was not able to solve the problem of poverty in India – who could? But she was able to pick up the next man, the next woman, the next child, she found half-dead by the side of the road.

“There is a God,” so we can and must act. “But we are not Him,” so after we have done what we can, we offer the rest to God’s loving, providential care.  We pray, and that is the best we can do.  There is a God; but I am not Him.

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