NOW that we are into some disasters and calamities, it’s good to
remind ourselves that God writes straight with crooked lines. We need to
strengthen our faith, making deliberate acts of faith to avoid letting the
pillars of our ultimate beliefs eroded by the many trials and difficulties we
are and will be experiencing because of them.
God is all good, all wise, all merciful. He does not want
to play tricks on us. He is not a hunter who likes to harass us and to strike
us in our most vulnerable moments. He is a good father who understands us well,
loves us no end, provides us with everything we need, and solves our problems
in their final terms.
He even assumes the mess that we make due to our
sinfulness, and converts them into our way of reconciliation. His will and ways
are actually simple and straightforward. What makes them to appear crooked are
our own natural limitations, personal weaknesses and our own sinfulness that
tend to complicate what is actually simple.
The gospel gives us the basis for all these claims and
beliefs. We are told to see and assess things more by faith rather than just
our common sense and the power of our sciences and natural knowledge.
“You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth
and the sky; why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” he said
(Lk 12,56), somehow telling us that we should not just look at the externals
and appearance of things, but rather into the internal and spiritual aspects,
where the interplay of God’s providence and our correspondence takes place.
This is the challenge we have to tackle. We need to study
the will and ways of God that actually are revealed to us with enough if not
abundant clarity in spite of the mysteries that they also contain. Are we doing
something about this challenge?
The faith broadens our mind and leads us to brace
ourselves to the full range of reality that we live in, a reality that includes
the natural and the supernatural, the material and the spiritual.
It’s the faith that sheds the proper and ultimate light
to everything in our life, including not only the good things that happen to
us, our victories and successes, but also the bad and sad things that spring
not so much from our natural limitations as from the infranatural or sub-human
frailties that arise from our sinfulness.
It’s the faith that gives meaning and salvation to the
suffering that we unavoidably will have in this life. In another part of the
gospel, for example, we are told that whenever some calamities occur, one thing
that we should remember as we go about tackling the consequences of such calamities
is that we need to repent.
Our life here on earth can be described in many ways,
most of them beautiful and of the fell-good type. But one realistic way of
describing it is that it is also a life meant to elicit in us sentiments of
repentance and conversion. That’s because of our sinfulness.
The pertinent gospel passage is the following: “Some
people told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the
blood of their sacrifices. He said to them in reply, ‘Do you think that because
these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other
Galileans?
“By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you
will all perish as they did!” (Lk 13,1-3)
May we not get lost in the drama provoked by the
calamities and disasters that visit us from time to time, a drama that
inevitably sparks off strong natural feelings of fear! We have to see the whole
picture painted by our faith. There we can see that God actually is conveying a
beautiful message for us, a message we need to know and live.
That’s the reason why we have to pray always. Prayer, for
us, should not just be an on-and-off affair. It should be like our breathing,
our very heartbeat. It’s what connects us vitally with God, and enables us to
see things the way God sees them.
We ought to remember that we actually cannot live without
God. Thinking otherwise would lead us to some fantasy world that for sure
cannot cope with all the fullness of the reality of our human life here on
earth.
With prayer, we somehow can detect that God actually
writes straight, but his writing may look crooked because of our limitations
and sinfulness.
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