Fr. Don's Daily Reflection - May 3, 2022
Psalm 62: “In you alone is my soul at rest. My help comes from you.”
It rightly seems tragic to us well-off First Worlders that the wretchedly poor we see on our television screens must spend every available moment scratching out an existence. We think of ourselves as so free of that. But are we? In speaking about his return, Jesus says (Luke 17:26-37) that it will be like it was in the days of Noah: “They ate and drank, they took husbands and wives, right up to the day Noah entered the ark--and when the flood came, it destroyed them all.”
Most of our time is absorbed in eating and drinking, sleeping, planting, taking husbands and wives, building, buying and selling. They not only absorb our time but easily also our energy. The tone of Jesus' words is that we are in danger of being too bound to all these activities, good in themselves. In that way we are hardly different from the very poor.
We have so much and yet we still push ourselves to have more and more, to more absorption in all these activities. Jesus tells us to take all this a little less seriously and to leave some space and time for attention to the end and the world to come. The end, whether of our world or our lives, will come in the midst of the ordinary pursuits of daily life. Definitely, they are not wrong in themselves; it's only that we need to keep them in perspective, not allow ourselves to be drowned in them. The mandatory isolation at times may give us the motivation and the time to be more introspective.
There should be time in our lives for each other, for God, for prayer and reflection, for worship, for silence, even for so-called useless things like poetry, games, music and dancing. Possibly those of us who do take time for these things have an obligation to witness to this at home and in public.
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!”
Reply to Fr. Don at: DTalafous@csbsju.edu
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