MY DEAR parishioners, I know a person who thinks faith and choosing are the same thing. He thinks his “power” to choose is supreme and that his choosing makes “okay” anything he says or does. So it matters little to him whether he prefers the goddess one day or a prosperity preacher the next. For him, the power to choose “creates” religion, in effect a virtual world of his own making and sweetened by his own creativity.
BUT HERE’S what I know about faith. I know my faith as a hunger. I hungered to seek and find the one true God. God himself found me in the howling wilderness. He cared for me. He kept me as the apple of his eye. I searched for a person and the truth. In Jesus I discovered both. My faith testifies in the Spirit that the Son of the Eternal Father is the Christ and that he is Truth itself. My faith impels me to know Jesus as Lord and be united in him. I do not come to Christ merely because I choose but because I must. He and he alone is faith’s object. He and he alone is the Saviour of mankind. His kingdom is ultimate reality. Mere human perceptions vanish in the air.
IT DOESN’T take an ounce of courage to end the life of a sick person because you can’t comprehend his suffering. If you really desire natural justice, take his place in the sick bed and take his suffering into your own body.
But I can’t, you answer. I understand. Then commit your beloved’s life and death to the hands of God.
AND GO, suffer your loved one’s experience in the dark night of prayer. Take his suffering on your soul. Intercede for him. Entrust him to God in your own spiritual agony. Love him in his helplessness. This is supernatural justice—not of the dead but of the living, not as you will but as God wills. God who answered Mary’s prayer will answer yours.
YOU HONOR your mortal, physical body by bathing often. You do this knowing that at death your body will be interred in the ground. Well, then, your soul flies to heaven when you die. Why refuse to bathe your spiritual, immortal soul in like manner to your body? Consider, in the hour of death, that as your human body is surrendered to the earth for its dissolution, your human soul will appear before God in heaven for its particular and eternal judgment. Therefore, honor your spiritual, immortal soul even as you cherish your human flesh by purifying it often in the cleansing fount of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
“ROW, ROW, row your boat,” goes the children’s song, “gently down the stream.” This is my great hope, of course, that I will experience life gently as I navigate my particular tributary in the stream of time. Nevertheless, the triad “row” reminds me of the hard work of living. Is life merely a dream? Hardly.
Yet, if dreams are a reminder of the brevity of life, then it’s an apt comparison for the form of this world which, as St. Paul taught, is passing away. As lovely as the rhyme “row your boat” is for little children, it doesn’t prompt me to cling to childish ways. The reality of life is this—I’m not removed from the prospect of storm and shipwreck; rather in Christ I’m delivered from fear of such things. God gives me courage. Like St. Thomas More before the scaffold, I may speak merrily of heaven even as I merely pass through this turbulent world. Sincerely in the hearts of Jesus and Mary. Your pastor, Reverend Richard Barker.