Fr. Don's Daily Reflection - January 19, 2025
Psalm 62: “In you alone is my soul at rest. My help comes from You.”
Brilliantly colored crucifixes from La Palma in northern El Salvador are sold in many places. Here you have the crucified Lord set in the midst of blue skies, white clouds, birds, blooming flowers, even idyllic little cottages. It must strike some as inappropriate. The suffering Savior amid such bright and happy scenes. But there's some sense to it. Suffering, pain, disappointment -- don't they all occur in very ordinary settings, even alongside the sunny and happy lives of our neighbors? We can be lying on a bed in pain and enervation while outside children run, play and scream with delight.
The happy and faith-filled couple just back from a devout pilgrimage across the sea get a call telling them that their twenty-year old college son has been admitted to a hospital with a tumor on the brain. Within hours his sister and three brothers, most coming from half-way across the country, are at the bedside of Tom. The tumor is successfully removed, but there remains the anxiety about its nature. At least momentarily mother lets thoughts like Job's pass through her mind and across her lips: “God's onslaughts wear me away” (Job 6:4b). Their sunny, love-filled home and life is shadowed by a grim cross. Yes, the cross can be, most often is, raised in the midst of ordinary and often pretty sunny life, amid blue skies, neat homes and flowering gardens.
Psalm 27: “I believe I shall see the Lord’s goodness / in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord; be strong; / be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord!”
