Psalm 62: “In you alone is my soul at rest. My help comes from you.”

The woman sitting with her back to me in the airport says to her companion: “I ordered a bagel with butter and cheese, and she looked at me as if she had never heard of such a thing.” Possibly the snack bar attendant was thinking of cholesterol. One thinks of how unique we are, how varied our behavior, how incomprehensible to others our actions are.

Travel and varied experience show us continually new, unheard of ways of doing things, customs we could never have imagined, practices that may frighten us a bit, some that undoubtedly offend us. In a village in India we pass a couple, man and woman, conversing as she walks several feet behind him; we ask for a toothpick and are surprised to have our table companion from Tanzania pick one out for us; a friend tells us of the family custom of peanut butter and onion sandwiches; adolescent boys walk hand-in-hand at the Taj Mahal; a woman orders a bagel with butter and cheese....

Will travel in the cosmos bring even stranger experiences? Will all our ways of doing things be up for examination? Each broadening of our perspective brings into question much that we have taken for granted. What remains? Do we clutch even more closely the manners and morals of our upbringing and look uncomprehendingly at whatever is different? Does all this perhaps give more meaning to a vision of God as the one sure thing? Or, are we trying to find our anchor in matters that cannot give us that surety, in something other than God who is, as the Psalms tell us, our rock, our fortress, our strength, our savior?

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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