A new website

I've talked before about a very influential thinker in modern catholic history by the name of George Weigel. I just found out that he has a web column. I'm not saying that I agree with everything Mr. Weigel says but I find him very thought provoking. Here it is....

http://www.archden.org/weigel/index.php

WNL

Last night we had a usual summer phenoeonon at my current parish (from now on referred to as STA = St. Thomas Aquinas) called Wednesday Night Liturgy or WNL. It's a smaller version of what takes place on Thursday nights here and is less dealing with mass and more with different forms of prayer.

I couldn't help but be astounded at the number of college students who were willing to gather together and pray. There was probably a lot that they could have been doing instead but here was a large group of young people gathered together to call upon the Holy Spirit for her gifts. I find that incredibly powerful.

though you are master of light you judge with clemency

This past week British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a shocking discovery: most of the terrorists that caused the bombings in his country were natives of his country. In other words, unlike the September 11th tragedy in our country, the enemy was from within. Up until this point, each time I heard about the London train bombings, I would immediately go back to the only real referent our country has had for such terror, certainly the only experience I've had had in my lifetimes. On the morning of September 11th, I remember thinking to myself, “Let’s just go blow them all up. Let’s find out who did it and just carpet bomb the entire country. Maybe innocent people will die in the process but it’s a small price to pay if we can feel safe again.”

The more I think about and ponder that selfish reaction, the more illogical it seems. In some ways, it is only logical to want swift retribution after an injustice. It’s easy to understand why the mother of the girl lost in Aruba is speaking out to reporters and calling the government there incompetent and corrupt. Her daughter is lost and no one can find her. It’s understandable to feel frustrated and want to take that out on other people.

Aren’t we all lucky, however, that this is not the way that God operates. Our first reading today reminds us that the fact that God doesn’t act like that when some terrible sin takes place is a sign of his power. This may seem like a contradiction to say that God’s clemency is a sign of his power but the truth is that wreaking havoc and causing destruction is the easy thing to do. Any brute can destroy. And, repaying terror with violence is just as easy. The real challenge is not to overreact, to hope in the face of hatred and anger that the person will realize that their actions are wrong and that they must stop them. This is how God reacts to our sins; to those times when we hurt other people.

He knows already who are the wheat and who are the weeds. He could go throughout the church and the world to pick out those people who are headed towards death and save those who are headed towards light. But this is not the way he operates. Even though it might seem that a perfect world without sinners is the best type of world, especially since this is the way God intended it from the beginning, sin still has a role to play.

This is the point of our gospel. God’s patience despite his power plays itself out in a world filled with temptations to sin. God sees all the sin and allows it to exist in the hopes that someone who has sinned, even just one person, will repent. But, patient hope for conversion is not the natural way to react to sin. The easiest way to react to sin is to throw the wheat out with the weeds, to remove the sinners from one’s life. The truth is that we must follow Paul’s advice from the second reading and call upon the Spirit in these difficult times. Even if we don’t know what to pray, the spirit intercedes for us to make us holy. In the midst of conflict and division, we may feel conflicted. Part of us may want to call upon God to carry out retribution for what has happened, like sending some SARS or AIDS or cancer or something awful like that to attack those who hurt us. Yet, as Christians, we are called to not hope that something bad will happen to them but, instead, to hope that they will repent and believe in the gospel. And, the more we analyze these situations, the farther we step away from our immediate reaction, we may even find some blame in it is our own. We may have done something to them that seemed to provoke their mean-spirited actions or we may even have misunderstood something that happened and believed we were wronged when, in fact, we were in the wrong. Morality is often shaded by such areas of gray instead of clearly delineated in black and white.

One great example of this is when a child or a brother or sister or someone else close to us comes and tells us they are gay. As a Catholic, we may feel conflicted about the whole issue of homosexuality. On the one hand, we may be tempted to react angrily and throw the person out of our life, despite knowing that they didn’t choose to be gay. Even though this is, for some of us, the natural reaction, I believe it is also the most unchristian, the most sinful. Yet, on the other hand, we may be happy that the person actually told us and find ways to support and love the person because it is what Jesus would have done. But we may struggle to help them understand the catholic teaching that homosexual acts are the sin, not the homosexual.

In the midst of this chaos, we who have ears ought to stop talking and listen. Ask for the Spirit’s guidance. Remember that learning how to live a moral life is not just an act of modeling the community but is also an act of God. And, most importantly, remember that when God was given the choice to punish or allow for repentance, to throw out the weeds with the some of the wheat, he gave us time to repent.