At the moment, for whatever reason, many people want to call themselves Catholic even though they refuse to listen to the Church.  The healthcare struggle demonstrated that pretty clearly.  So, you have those within the Church who want to change it (in ways that would destroy it), and those outside the Church who simply want to destroy it.  That’s a lot of pressure on the Church.  Pray for the Pope and the bishops.  They will need all the prayer they can get.

I think many bishops have been confused for many years now about what to do.  In trying to “save” the Church many have hurt it badly.  We hear about it daily.  Now I think the choices are so stark and few that more of them will get it right.  This goes for all us faithful too.  There will be few lukewarms left.  There will be no middle ground.  We should be praying for one another as well.  We too have made bad choices.

This is not new.  It has happened all through God’s history, from Adam right down to us.  It’s the old sin/salvation circle we see in the Book of Judges: Israel is faithful to the Lord, Israel falls into idolatry, Israel is punished by her neighbors, Israel repents and calls on the Lord, God raises up a Judge (or has mercy), Israel is delivered, and then finally Israel is once again faithful to the Lord.  So, where are we on the circle?  I think we are between idolatry and punishment.  It sure feels like punishment.  I’m not sure how fast we will move through the cycle.  God’s timing is still a mystery to me.

I find it an odd sensation, though, watching the anti-Christian and especially anti-Catholic world grow larger and larger throughout my life.  I assumed at one time that I lived in a Christian world.  Over time that assumption has altered.  Now I am not sure what I live in.  Is it largely a pagan world, or is it just that a minority of people have a firm grip on positions of influence and power?  Some days I read of a small victory and hope it is the beginning of a turn around.  But that small victory is too often followed by more bad news.

Perhaps it is my limited view point, but it seems the situation we find ourselves in today is not exactly the same as in past histories of persecution.  This one seems even more widespread.  The world seems even more chaotic and confused.  When has truth ever been questioned so much?  When have so many people denied the existence of any higher power?

Much of this is, I think, due to our incredible communication technology that connects so much of our world every second of the day.  There is not much bad news that escapes our awareness, even if it turns out the news was not true.  The line between gossip and news seems very thin indeed.

I am a curious type, and I wonder where we are headed.  But I think that can be a danger for me.  I can too easily get caught up in the news (or gossip) of the day and forget the Good News.  I too easily forget that Christ has won the victory and that He is looking after me better than I can look after myself.  I don’t need to worry.  There is nothing that happens to me that is not for my good if I but trust in Him.  I need also to remember that history is literally His story.

I need to see this as a time of grace. “This is the day which the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.” (Ps 118:24).  In addition, since I am a worrying type of guy, I need to keep in my mind and heart 1 Thess 5: 16-18: “Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”  This passage of Scripture is so radical that it always makes me stop and think how far worldly wisdom is from God’s wisdom.

Rejoice always?  Even with all the negative news?  Well, this is what we are called to.  Pray constantly?  Does Paul really mean that?  There are certainly plenty of reasons to try to pray constantly.  Give thanks in all circumstances.  All circumstances?  It makes no sense unless we truly believe that “in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28).  Can I really trust that all that happens to me and all that happens in the world will work out for the good if I hold firm to Christ and his promises?  That takes faith.  I think we are entering an age of faith.

One morning in the first week of our brand new marriage, she asked if I wanted some scrambled eggs (actually, I thought it was the very first morning of our marriage, but I have learned not to argue with my wife’s memory because it is usually better).  She managed to crack the eggs and get them into the frying pan, but then I noticed she was just standing by the stove, spoon in hand, and watching them cook.  They were quickly becoming one large, flat, sunny side everywhere pancake.  I quickly took the spoon and began stirring the eggs as I said something like, “You have to keep stirring them to make them scramble.”  There was no answer.  I looked around at an empty kitchen.  In an instant she had completely disappeared.  Clearly, she had talents I hadn’t counted on.

I called out, but there was no answer.  I climbed the stairs of the old farm house we had rented and found her propped up in bed calmly reading a book.  I asked her, in my nicest tone, what she was doing.  “Reading” was the calm reply.  I should have seen that coming but, remember, I was newly-married.  I was not prepared for our first tiff.  In fact, I had never even considered that this sort of thing would occur in our marriage.  I was on a steep learning curve, and it was definitely up hill.

I tried again.  “Why did you leave?”  Her answer was still in that very calm voice that I was coming to realize spoke volumes.  “If you want to cook, you can cook.”

In my defense, I remind you that she had asked me to help her with the cooking.  In hindsight, I hope I had enough sense not to point that out to her, but I probably did.  I was still green as grass.  I have since come to understand that husbands understand certain phrases in quite different ways than wives understand them.  Obviously, helping her learn to cook did not mean what I thought it had meant.

I learned the lesson well.  I never offered help in the kitchen again, unless it was a simple “Anything I can do to help?”  As long as she was directing, everything was fine.  I have come to realize that for some women a kitchen is like the bridge on a ship, and it is clear who the captain of the bridge is.

Lest you think my wife is some kind of ogre, I hasten to add that she is all I’d hoped she would be.  I couldn’t have found a better wife for me and mother for our children.  As a bonus, she became a fantastic cook.  We did have some interesting meals on the road to greatness, like the salt soup.  It started out as lintel soup, I believe, but one could only taste salt.  I said nothing.  I left it up to her to bring it up, which she did.  “This soup is a bit salty,” she said, or something like that.

She dumped our servings out and doubled the recipe, without the salt.  It was still inedible, but it wasn’t me that pointed it out.  She ended up dumping it all out.  I said nothing.  I can’t remember what we ate, but I know I ate it as if it had been the planned entree.

That was a long time ago.  Somehow, over the years, she managed to become an excellent cook — without my help.  Our children grew up thinking all mothers came equipped as four star chefs.  For them, eating was always a pleasure.  Everyday meals were delicious.  Special occasions, like Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving — well, feasts best describes them.

She can spend two or three days, or more counting dessert, preparing these special dinners.  It takes her that long because, not only does she prepare a feast of food, she prepares the whole house.  She truly makes these special meals celebrations of life.  I am truly a blessed man considering I wasn’t even thinking about food when I proposed to her, and she turns out to be a gift in one of the most crucial aspects of life — food.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  Well, yes I do.  I was stunned by her obvious charms, cooking not being one of them.  Only later did I come to realize how important eating is to human beings.

I don’t just mean food is important, which it obviously is.  Rather, I am struck by all the love, care, and hard work that have gone into the thousands of meals she has prepared over the years.  Somehow love is communicated, or can be communicated, through food, its preparation, and the enjoying of it.  The simple act of eating together can build community through the communication of love.  How clever God is to make something so necessary so he could build into it a means of our growth in charity.

How we eat that food, then, is very important.  To simply eat to survive is not much fun.  It is just as important to enjoy meals as social occasions.  I am often struck by how important a role food plays in human existence.  When a couple weds, the wedding meal is almost as central as the wedding itself.  This is one of the big errors in eloping — no meal with family and friends.

I can recall when a young woman I knew was planning her wedding.  She came from a very strong ethnic community, and she was upset because all her mother’s friends wanted to bring food to the wedding banquet.  She wanted a beautifully catered affair, which is what she got in the end.  I thought that was very sad — sad for her and for her mother’s friends.  I now know how important it was for them to contribute to the occasion.  Food is more than sustenance for the body.  This is a lesson my wife taught me.  Our special meals became more and more festive as the years passed and as her talents grew.  She knew how to feed us in every way.

This brings me to my main point, in case you’ve been wondering.  Why is it humans have feasts or parties and animals don’t? It’s not just because they can’t hang bunting and party balloons.  Monkeys are very similar to us, but they don’t throw feasts, as far as I know.  They act toward food much as I did in my bachelor days.  I tried to make my meals as efficient as I could.  I was quite pleased with myself when I could cook and eat my whole meal out of one pot.  You guys, except the ones who actually roast garlic and such, know what I mean.  You were there once.  It’s the primitive urge to cook simply over the hunting fire.  Bachelors are willing to admit fire is a good thing, but we don’t want to take it too far.

Yes, we do.  My wife taught me that.  That’s one reason we men need wives, so we will learn that there is more to life than efficiency.  Besides weddings, every major and millions of minor human milestones are recorded in the collective memory of family and friends with the aid of food.  This is why in most of our photos of special occasions we are seated around a table.  This is true for every culture I’ve ever heard of.  Would people travel and not want to eat the food of the country they were visiting?  Food has to be at least half the reason for travelling.  I would rather eat in Italy than look at fountains.  I can’t think of any area in which humans have been more creative than in preparing and eating food.  If I were a publisher who wanted to make money, I would publish cookbooks.  They always sell.  There are never too many cookbooks.  If there were such a thing, we would have stopped publishing them years ago.

Efficiency is the key word here.  Too much of our modern life is dictated by this dangerous word.  Food, at least the preparing and eating of it, may just be a last-stand against this prevailing trend toward boredom.  Now, efficiency in its place is fine, but its place is not at the dinner table and certainly not at feasts and parties.  Feasts and parties are inefficient for a reason.  The reason is that humans are not animals, or not only animals.  We are a special form of animal, an animal with a spiritual soul.  We live in two realms, the material one and the supernatural one.  This is a difficult job.  We can’t ignore either aspect of our existence without doing harm to ourselves materially or spiritually.

To be truly efficient, we need to take both the material and the supernatural into consideration.  What is considered efficient in the material may not be very efficient in the spiritual.  Take eating, again, as an example.  It might not be considered efficient for my wife to spend two or three days preparing an Easter dinner that my family will eat in less than half an hour.  But that doesn’t deter her.  She happily does it year after year.  There is something in her human nature that finds it, not efficient, but necessary.  Her meals feed not only our bodies but our souls as well.  When we consider ourselves as we truly are, a material-spiritual being, we have to consider efficiency in a completely different way.

We are made in the image of God, that’s why we are spirits.  When we forget God we forget who we truly are, and our world tends to become more efficient in the wrong way.  We stop feeding our souls, even with the gifts given to us by God in the material world.  We don’t take the time to do the things that can feed more than just our bodies.  Celebrations and food, thanks be to God, seem to resist this trend more than most things.

When people tell me there is no such thing as God or the spiritual, I remind them of birthday parties. I figure birthday parties are a solid argument for the spiritual.  If we were only material beings we wouldn’t bother with birthday parties.  They are too inefficient.  Waste of time.  Look at the animals.  When was the last time you saw a cocker spaniel throw a party?

The best times of our lives, the times we get the most joy in life, are not usually when we are being efficient in that limited, material sense.  So, let’s have longer meals, more celebrations, and take the time to pet our animal friends who don’t throw parties.

Often, when I taught a college class, I would tell the students that, given the realities of their lives, there was nowhere they would rather be at that moment than right where they were, in my class. Then I would ask if anyone disagreed with me.

You can try it for yourself if you would like, but with a twist since you are not sitting in one of my classes. Try to think of something, within the last week or two, you had to do but you really didn’t want to do. This would be something you dreaded doing or felt forced to do. Once you have that in mind, let’s return to the class.

You can imagine the reactions I would get from students. Some would agree with me, but many would argue they would rather be in Hawaii or some other exotic spot. The exchange would usually go something like this:

Me: “Can you afford a trip to Hawaii?”

Student: “No!”

Me: “Remember, I said ‘given the realities of your lives.’ If you can’t afford it then it is not in your reality.” Then I would push it a bit. “Do you have a credit card?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me : “Would your card allow you to put a trip to Hawaii on it?”

Student: “Yeah.”

Me: “Then why don’t you go to Hawaii instead of sitting in my class?” I would usually get a bit nervous at this point lest the student would jump up and head for the nearest travel office and on to Hawaii. But it never happened.

Student: “I’m already far enough in debt. I don’t want to go deeper into debt.”

Other students would be less ambitious and say they would rather be in the library studying for a test or researching a paper or something of the sort. Some would just rather be walking in the woods or on the beach, if it was a nice day. When I would point out that all of those options were open to them and yet they had chosen to come to class, they would protest that they had to come to class. I would challenge them and ask why they had to come to my class. What was forcing them to do so? At this point some would get frustrated with me while others would begin to see my point.

Why is it that even though we are free to choose what we want to do, within the realm of our personal realities, it often feels as if we are being forced to do things against our wills? Why do we say “I had to do it”, rather than “I chose to do it”? Let me try to explain why I think this happens.

I once passed a religious book store with a shirt in the window. On the shirt was written: IN THIS WORLD THERE ARE ONLY TWO THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW: THERE IS A GOD AND YOU ARE NOT HIM. Perhaps you have heard this statement before. It is quite common. I laughed when I first read it. Then I began to think about it and how very profound it actually was.

There are many ways in which I think it is profound, but I will look at one in particular. It gave me insight into my little experiment in class.

We are made in the image and likeness of God, but, as the shirt proclaimed, we are not God. This means a couple of things. First, one of the ways we are like God relates to the fact that we have free will. We can freely choose. Secondly, while we are free to choose, in a God like manner, our choices are limited to reality, God’s reality – not ours, because we are not God and did not create the reality.

Now, reality leads to consequences. Through observation and experience, we learn that certain actions have certain consequences. If I put a trip to Hawaii on my credit card, which I am free to do, I will have a very big bill on my credit card account at the end of the month. If I choose to go study for an exam instead of going to an assigned class, I may miss something in the class. Sometimes that may be the best option, to miss the class in order to get a better grade in another class.

All our lives we must weigh consequences for our decisions and pick what seems the best option. When we are torn between consequences, we do not feel very free. We feel forced. Recall to mind the situations I asked you to considered at the outset, those things you didn’t want to do but felt you had to do, were almost forced to do. There really was no force except the consequences you could see. In this world we don’t even know if the consequences we foresee will actually result, and often we get blind-sided by consequences we knew nothing about. No wonder we sometimes don’t feel very free.

Sometimes the strain in choosing between alternatives results from too many good consequences to choose between. We would like both or all the consequences, but can only choose one. This can also leave us feeling un-free or forced.

When we get angry about the choices we feel we have to make, I think we are really getting angry because we are not God. There is something in humans that hankers after being more than just made in the image of God. Think of Adam and Eve. They were free to choose, but they had been told of the consequences of a certain choice, eating the fruit of a particular tree. Yes, they were free, even free to disobey and eat of the forbidden fruit, but they were not free of the consequences. I’m not sure they even fully understood the consequences. After all, they believed the serpent when he told them they would not die. They seem to have been a little confused about just what dying meant.

We have this incredible power to choose, to will what we want, but it is always limited by the consequences of our choices. There’s the rub. In the end, it is God’s will that will be accomplished through his reality and his consequences.

How can we escape this predicament? One way is to say, “To hell with the consequences, I will do as I please.” This is what Satan chose. But it was not the consequences that went to hell.

Or, we could choose those consequences that lead us to heaven. Now, there are two attitudes we can have in choosing consequences that lead to heaven. We can choose out of fear or we can choose out of love. When we feel forced into a choice, we are choosing out of fear, fear of hell perhaps or, more often I think, fear of the immediate consequence. Often we think that God’s will is going to lead to unhappiness. We fear his will for us and often try to escape it much as Jonah tried to escape God’s will for him. This is a minimalist approach to heaven, just enough obedience through fear to get us in, but not so much obedience so as to make us unhappy. There is not much sense of freedom in this approach. In fact, those who rebel against God totally probably feel freer for the time being, until the truth, God’s consequences, catches up with them.

If, instead, we choose out of love, we do not feel forced nor do we fear. Simply because we know that God loves us enough to die for us, we respond by loving him and his will and by choosing to die to our wills, to our choices that are contrary to God’s will. If we truly trust God, we will not fear the death to our choices, nor will we fear God’s will for us, because we know it will lead to our true happiness, here on earth as well as in heaven. This is true freedom. In this freedom we are not torn between God’s will and what we think will make us happy. Rather, we know that true joy lies in God’s will, even if it means some suffering. This is the path that Jesus chose and modeled for us.

As Jean Pierre de Caussade said: “Sanctity consists in willing what happens to us by God’s Order. Yes, the sanctity of the heart consists in a simple fiat, the simple disposition of the will in conformity with the Will of God. What could be easier?”

It’s simple, but I’m not so sure it is easy. Ultimately, no matter how difficult it may seem, I have come to realize that there is nothing we should rather be doing than God’s will for us, and that we should choose God’s will with joy. That’s how we gain true freedom.

He was trying to summarize one of the Star Wars episodes. I can’t remember which one it was. I’m afraid George Lucas lost me in his numbering system after the first three original movies. And, thanks to my son’s penchant for recounting movies in great detail, I don’t ever have to see this episode, whichever one it is. But I might. Not just because my son said I should, but because of his review of the movie.

It seems in this episode we find out why Darth Vader went to the Dark Side. If that wasn’t enough to hook me, a friend a few days later said I had to see it, because it explains the whole Star Wars saga. Lucas has, I fear, done it again. What has he done? Well, he’s probably intrigued me enough, along with millions of others, to rent one more of his movies. How does he do it?

He’s no fool. I think he touches the very basic human nature in all of us. I’m not sure how familiar he is with the Bible, but he certainly is familiar with the themes in the Bible. He has saved one of the most basic human themes, or sins to be more accurate, for the basis of his whole Star Wars saga.

I don’t want to give the story away to anyone who is as far behind in movies as I am and has not yet seen this episode, so I will try to keep this general. If the reader is one of that handful of people, such as myself, who has not yet seen the movie and may be concerned lest what follows reveal too much, I suggest you stop reading now.

According to my son, for those of you who are venturing on with me, Darth Vader wants to save the love of his life from death, and the only way he can see to do this is to go to the Dark Side. Aha, I said to myself. Brilliant! It’s so human. It’s so contemporary. Well, sin is always contemporary, isn’t it? What jumped out at me was a basic Catholic moral principle, “one may never do evil so that good may result from it.” (Catechism #1789). Or, in more common language, “The end does not justify the means” (Catechism #1753).

My son went on to explain the irony that it was only because Darth Vader went to the Dark Side that his worst fear was realized. His actions guaranteed the very thing he was trying to avoid. How human. How tragic. How common. How central, not only to Lucas’s epic, but to the whole human story. Lucas, intentionally or not, goes right back to Genesis and the beginning for his basic theme.

Consider Adam and Eve. The serpent is no fool. He’s not going to come right out and tell Adam and Eve to disobey God and to eat the fruit. Oh no. He makes disobedience and pride sound like good common sense. “No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods knowing good and evil.” Now that sounds pretty good. It sounded pretty good to Eve. “The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was desirable for the knowledge that it could give. So she took some of its fruit and ate it.”

Notice that everything that the serpent tempts them with are goods: eyes will be opened, they will be like gods, they will know good and evil. Humans always sin, St. Thomas Aquinas tells us, by choosing some good. The problem is that we humans choose some lesser good over The Good, God. The irony, as with Adam and Eve, is that we delude ourselves into thinking we are choosing the greater good. What harm could come from eating the fruit, especially compared with the good that would follow. The ends seem to justify the means.

And so it goes down through history. Humans are always tempted to achieve what seems a greater good by some act of disobedience and pride. Think of the many horrible dictatorships of the twentieth century that began with a great goal in mind. Hitler claimed he only had the good of his people in mind. At first it may have seemed true, but over time he said that good could only be achieved by more and more brutal means. Even the Allies fell prey to the same old sin. How many evil means were justified by what seemed the ultimate good end, the ending of the war. That sounds terribly familiar, doesn’t it?

Marxism is just one long argument for ends justifying the means, especially as it was and is played out in communism around the world. But we don’t have to go so far from home to find this basic sin. How often do we justify our sins by this same principle. We usually start out with small compromises and then they begin to grow, like weeds in the garden. Soon enough we too are on the Dark Side trying to gain some end that we feel justifies our little sinful choices.

I believe this simple principle, or its negation, explains much of what passes in our modern world today. In fact, I would say most people today don’t even consider it a valid moral principle. It’s not practical. Consider the Catholic politicians such as Nancy Pelosi who ignore Catholic morality in their public life. They claim that there is some higher end that justifies such a suspension of moral principles.

In her case, it is a woman’s right to choose. Abortion, euthanasia, homosexual behavior, fornication, and divorce are all defended, ultimately, on the idea that the end is good and, therefore, allowable. That end is often stated as “tolerance” or “compassion” or “a woman’s right to choose.” But in seeking these ends outside this basic moral principle, we destroy the very thing we seek. Women are not freer thanks to abortion. Their freedom is lost to abortion.

Lucas knows what he is doing. His movie speaks to the perennial human dilemma. Nancy Pelosi has abandoned this basic principle just as Adam and Eve did, just as Darth Vader did, and just as so many of us have at times. We all need to leave the Dark Side and come to Jesus’ side.

With my ears tuned to arguments in the form of either/or as a result of that, I began to find many instances where this occurred. The phrase “pro-choice” is an example of either/or thinking in a more subtle way. It implies some people are in favor of freedom of choice while others are opposed to choice. But choice and freedom are not absolute goods. We can make bad choices and we can use our freedom in harmful ways. Making choice an absolute good, as an either/or question, eliminates the need to discuss which choices are good and which are bad.

Often we see the same confusion with the question of censorship, either you agree with censorship or you agree with freedom of expression. It may not be quite so simple. One could agree with both. This would require discussion about when and under what circumstances censorship would be the best choice, or when freedom of expression is legitimate and when it is not.

To be, or not to be, tolerant, that is the question, or so it often seems. One might think that even the Bible supports this when it states, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” (Matt 7:1.) But then later, in the same Gospel, it states, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone.” (Matt 18:15) How are we to “tell him his fault” without judging that a fault exists?

If we read the context around the quotations we understand that “judgment” is a complex issue. Sometimes we are called to judge some things, and sometimes we should refrain from any judgment. We can judge behavior when it is necessary and right to do so (as in the second quote above), but we should never judge people, that is, the condition of their soul (Catechism of the Catholic Church #1861). When we judge behavior, we are judging whether or not an action is morally sinful in an objective sense, what theologians call material sin. We are not judging subjectively whether or not a person has actually committed a sin, what theologians call formal sin. Only God can judge that. The Church has always taught, as did Jesus with His whole life and death, that we are to separate the sin from the sinner, to love the sinner while detesting sin.

But even when it comes to judging behavior, we are cautioned against rash judgement. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “To avoid rash judgment, everyone should be careful to interpret insofar as possible his neighbour’s thoughts, words and deeds in a favorable way” (Catechism #2478). So, we should be tolerant, “insofar as possible” and yet we need to judge when it is necessary and right to do so. Clearly, to judge or not to judge is a complex question, not a simple either/or.

Jesus demonstrated that these either or questions can be traps and we are not to fall for them. When asked whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not, He did not fall for the trap, but demonstrated that the flaw was in the reasoning of those who questioned Him (Matthew 22: 17-22).

Whether we should be tolerant of a particular behavior or not depends on many variables. It’s not a matter of always being tolerant of people and behavior or never being tolerant of people and behavior, even though that is how some issues are presented. The either/or argument for tolerance is often used to try to trap Catholics in discussing our Church’s stand against homosexual behavior.

These very comments of mine could become just another example of either /or thinking if I didn’t point out that some issues really are of the either/or variety. That is, it’s not simply a question of either using either/or arguments or not using them. There are times when it is appropriate, and necessary, to put questions in the stark choice of either/or. Since adultery is always a grave moral evil, to phrase the choice as “either adultery is always wrong or it is not”, is a correct way to state the choice because there is no other alternative. Therefore, it is crucial to differentiate between issues that are clearly either/or and those that are not.

We may desire simple choices, but either/or thinking does not always serve truth and justice. This can be frustrating and confusing at times, and it requires our patience, humility, and trust in God. We may be called to take positions on some issues or to make judgments, but, God willing, we will judge the issues or behavior, not the people. Instead of merely tolerant, we will be loving and truthful toward them.

The story is just another reminder that suffering is still a huge mystery, even for those of us who believe in the Christian God.  Why does God allow certain suffering and yet perform miracles for others to relieve their sufferings?  Certainly God’s ways are not our ways, and He truly is a mystery.  Our faith does not supply all the answers.  If it did, it would no longer be faith.

This story also reminds me that God is very patient.  He does not solve problems instantly.  Rather, He works over time with feeble, broken, limited, sinful humans.  As Christians, we believe God is the Lord of history and that His will is being accomplished over time.  As St. Paul says (Eph 1: 9-10 and 1 Co 15: 28), God has a plan, but it will take all of history before it is complete.  I don’t understand why God seems to work so slowly and in such a hidden way, nor do I understand how He will make sense out of all the seeming chaos of history and human error.  I don’t know why Christ didn’t heal all the sick and suffering or set up a worldly kingdom that would have brought peace and justice to the whole world.  Why didn’t He raise all the dead and inaugurate the Kingdom then and there?

So, in such times of doubt, or at least mystery and perhaps confusion, on what do I base my faith?  I know that faith is a leap, but it should not be a blind or a foolish leap.  Today, when there are plenty of people who would ridicule and question such a faith as ours, what is my certitude based on?  How do I know I am not just being foolish?

The traditional proofs of God are good and useful at times, perhaps even at times of such doubt.  They have been helpful to me in the past.  Certainly there is no more proof that there is not a God than there is for a God.  I would argue it takes more faith today, knowing what we know of the intricate, precise beauty of creation from stars to the smallest atomic particle, to not believe in a God than it does to believe in one.  I still believe in logic enough to question what the first cause was that caused everything that followed it.  I also think both the beauty and the order of nature argue strongly for a God who created beauty and order.

But what do I tell my son when he asks me why I believe as I do?  There has to be something less formal, less intellectual, and more personal for me.  To say I believe because my father and mother did, because their father and mother did is not good enough today, if it ever was. When I am questioned by very well educated people who no longer have any faith in logic or reason or truth or the good or the beautiful, what do I say to them?

My life experience tells me that I have three crucial choices.  First, I can live my life in service of love or power.  Second, I can choose a path of pride or humility.  Lastly, I can choose obedience or self-rule.

Life has taught me, my conscience tells me, and my heart tells me that I should choose love, humility, and obedience.  My experience also tells me that the person who has taught this most completely, and the person who has lived this most fully, is Jesus Christ.  This is one of the major reasons why I am a Christian and a Catholic.  All my being and experience tells me this is the truest and the best way to live.  It also tells me that the closer all of us can come to living like this, the better this world will be.  My experience also tells me that the more I live a life based on power, pride, and self-rule, the more unhappy and miserable I will be, and the more people who live their lives in pursuit of power, steeped in pride, and determined to be self-ruled, the uglier and more dangerous this world will become.

I have tested this hypothesis through my life, sometimes unconsciously.  I have chosen power.  I have been proud, and I have desired self-rule, and I still do at times, too many times.  It has caused me a great deal of pain and robbed me of true peace and joy.  The more I am able to choose love over power, humility over pride, and obedience over self-rule, the sweeter life has been, the more joy I have experienced, and the more peace I have attained.  To be sure, one has to be patient, because the results are not immediate.  Power, pride, and self-rule give us quicker results, but the results turn from what we had expected to ashes in our mouths.  The results of choosing love, humility and obedience take time, sometimes a great deal of time.  This is why, I think, the lessons of life so often elude us and why we so often resort to what looks like the quick answer.  We are not patient enough in testing hypotheses.  We look for the quick result and miss the point.

I have not only tested this hypothesis in my own life.  I have observed the same law at work in society at large, both in my own lifetime and through a reading of history.  Any society that honors love, humility, and obedience and encourages its citizens to pursue these virtues, is by far a more humane society. One that honors, and encourages the pursuit of power, pride, and self-rule is a very crude, brutal society that is tending toward chaos.  Some societies have come closer to the ideal than others, but my reading of history tells me that the Christian religion has had more impact on society at large toward the ideal than any other religion.  Again, I think we tend to miss this in our short-sightedness.  We have forgotten how cruel and brutal society was a few thousand years ago.  We forget that many of the advances we have made in the humane treatment of one another have occurred in a largely Christian context.  My experience also tells me that as we turn our backs on that Christian context, we are beginning to lose what we have gained in humane community and the more we slide toward a crude, brutal chaos.

This, I tell my sons and daughter, is one reason why I am a Christian and why I strive to live my life in love, humility, and obedience to God and all His lawful authority.  By my experience, it only makes sense.

The story of the widow of Nain reminds me that Christ lived His life in complete obedience to His Father.  All His power was subject to His Father’s will as we hear in John’s Gospel.  “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing” (Jn 5: 19).  Here, I believe, is the key to the mystery.  We are called by our very nature, our original nature and not our fallen nature, to conform our wills to God’s will, to do and say only what God gives us to do and say.  When we do, we are powerless, but filled with love and God’s power.  We are also humble and desire to serve others, not ourselves.  Our fallen nature screams out against this choice.  It feels like death to self, which it is, and we fight for what seems our very lives.  Christ told us this: “…unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.  He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn 12: 24-25).  This is Christ’s central message, a message of love for God and neighbour, a love that sacrifices its very life for another.  Amid all the confusion, contradictions, and mysteries that exist in my life, in history, even in the Bible, this is my faith, a faith in Jesus Christ and his word and his ultimate example on the Cross.  This is my faith in the most radical, profound and difficult message ever delivered to humanity, to die to myself and to live in God’s Will.

This is the crucial choice we always have before us, to choose as our fallen nature desires, to gain this world, or to choose what our true nature was created for, love of God and love of others and eternal life.  We all know what a tough decision that is.  It is so easy to loose sight of eternity, something we can hardly comprehend, especially when we are faced with day to day struggles.  Each struggle can seem like a threat to our very being.

This is why I believe Christianity is so radical and so difficult to choose completely.  Do we really want to follow Christ?  We only have to look at where He ended His life to see what a challenge that is.  To many, it is a foolish choice.  As St. Paul points out, without the Resurrection, it would truly be a foolish choice.  The widow of Nain received her son back into this world, but it is still not the answer we are looking for.  Her son still had to die again.  Christ’s Resurrection is the answer we desire, eternal life.  I still don’t understand why Jesus raised this woman’s son from death and not others.  There are still so many other mysteries and unanswered questions I have about my faith and about life, but I have no doubt that Christ surely is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  He is the greatest message ever sent and I will risk my life and death on it.

All of this was expressed with a good deal of excitement and the assumption that my wife and I would not only condone their behaviour, but actually share their excitement. They were now on their way back home and had decided to stop off for a few days to see Banff. Their parents had not heard from them until a few days earlier when they had visited one of the girl’s uncle’s in Edmonton, about 400 kilometres north of Banff. He had given them money to take a bus straight back home to Vancouver. They had changed the tickets to Banff and pocketed the difference. They laughed at his concern which they thought was insincere because, as one of them expressed it, “he was only worried that something might happen to us.“ I’m not sure what they would have considered sincere concern.

By this point in their story I was pretty upset, but I didn’t show it. I asked them if they intended returning home. They assured me they did. I asked them if they would go back to their high schools in the coming year while living at home and generally depending on their parents for their support. They all agreed they would. They showed no signs that they could see what I was driving at. It seemed perfectly acceptable to them. Eventually, I ended up speaking to just one of the girls. She seemed the most responsible of the three. I asked her if she would run away again without telling her parents anything. She said no, she would ask next time. I was relieved to hear that, but then she added, with no sign of chagrin, that she knew her mother would not say no because now her mother knew she would leave anyway.

The story took an interesting twist at this point. One girl mentioned the horrible bus ride they had just taken from Edmonton. All three chimed in about how bad it had been. It seems there was a mother travelling with two children, a boy and a girl, and these children were running up and down the aisle of the bus making so much noise that the three teenagers could not sleep. One of them summed it all up by stating, “That mother should be ashamed of herself because she had no control over those children at all.” I’m sure my mouth fell open as I looked from one girl to the next to see if any of them had caught the irony. None had. They were all in agreement and gave various examples of how uncontrolled the young children were on the bus.

I began to wonder what had happened to the “good old runaway.” By that I mean the young man or woman who believes life at home is intolerable and thinks he or she can do better on his or her own. These runaways were either too proud to return, no matter how bad it was away from home, or they returned, as did the “Prodigal Son”, with a sense of humility. But not these girls. There was no sense of responsibility for their choices. Their parents owed it to them to support them, but they had no responsibility in return. As far as I could determine, they had no sense of obedience owed to their parents, no requirement to submit to lawful authority. And yet they expected it from those two young children. I’m sure they took for granted that the world would continue to function according to laws and standards that make community and social life possible, but I don’t think they saw any personal responsibility in making that work by any submission to authority on their part.

I don’t think those three teenagers were very different from many adults in our society who see submission, obedience, and authority as dirty words. I have taught college for over thirty years, and I know that those three words, if used in class, would arouse an angry, irrational response from many of my students. Many people today, including people I know, seem to assume that law and order and civil life are somehow a given without any effort on their part, or, for the more cynical, that obedience and submission are fine for the suckers but not for the smart people.

Satan said it so many years ago, “I will not serve.” He then got Adam and Eve to disobey God and to refuse to submit to God’s command. And so it goes. Humans have a very difficult time submitting their wills to anyone. And yet for most of us, a moment’s thought reveals that in order to have civil society we must submit to various laws, regulations, and community standards. In short, we must submit to lawful authority, including governments, but also parents, teachers, police officers and, ultimately the source of all authority, God. Somehow these words, authority, obedience, and submission, have come to be seen as obscene rather than as valued necessities for a healthy society. How has this happened? How have we become so blind to what should be so obvious?

I have often wondered why Satan, who had such a powerful, clear intellect, would choose not to serve God. I realize it was his pride, but that seems so stupid a choice, pride over Truth. Yet I believe that was the choice. If Satan would not submit to God, Truth itself, how difficult it is for humans to submit. And if we are not prepared to submit to God, how are we ever going to submit to lesser authority.

“When Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had long desired to see him, because he had heard about him, and he was hoping to see some sign done by him. So he questioned him at some length” (Lk. 23: 8-9).

Herod was curious about Jesus, but, I suspect, was not prepared to submit to the Truth. So often in the Gospels we read about people who wanted to question Jesus, see the miracles, know more about Him out of curiosity, but were not prepared to follow Him, to submit. How often are we like Herod and these others? We want to know more about Jesus. We want to see some signs and wonders, we question, but are we willing to submit to the truth?

I am, in many ways, just like Herod and, closer to home, just like the three teenagers in my story above. I expect God to give me my daily bread, my health, my safety, the safety of my family, the very breath I take each moment, and yet how often do I consider where these all come from or how much I owe in response and thanks? Am I truly grateful to the point of submission before the truth, or am I like those three teenage girls who could see how un-submissive were the two little children on the bus, but were unable to relate it to themselves? I asked earlier how people could be so blind as to not see how necessary submission, authority, and obedience are to a civil society. I think one of the problems is that, just like the three teenagers, we can see how necessary it is for other people, but not for ourselves.