But as my faith matured, I realized that elections were not really that important. I still vote - I don't believe I have ever missed a vote in the 40-odd years I've been eligible to vote - but who I vote for is problematic. I cannot support either major political party since both fall far short of my Catholic values. Such a muddle. In my homily at Mass this past Sunday, I described my conundrum and the resolution I've come to. Here it is.
Thirty-First
Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B
Readings: Deut 2:2-6 Heb
7:23-28 Mk 12:28b-34
We live in a culture
which is desperately wounded and in dire need of healing. Allow me to share a few symptoms of the
disease.
- In recent years, approximately 22% of all pregnancies in the United States, excluding miscarriages, have ended in abortion.
- In 2011, approximately 41% of live births in the United States were to unmarried women.
- In 2010, over 21% of US children lived in poverty, despite living in a country with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world.
- In the past 20 years, the number of people in federal and state prisons has more than doubled, so that today the US has a greater portion of its citizens incarcerated than any other country.
- From 2007-2001, 220 prisoners were executed by the US federal and state governments. Only China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia executed more. Nobody was executed by the state in Europe, Canada, Australasia, or Latin America.
- So far this year, more than twice as many US military personnel have committed suicide as have been killed in combat.
- In 2010, 23 million people in the US suffered from drug or alcohol abuse, yet fewer than 3 million of them received treatment for their addictions.
I could go on, but
these symptoms indicate a culture that is more attuned to death than to life; a
culture that places self ahead of other; a culture that has confused liberty
with licentiousness, and a culture which has confused the pursuit of happiness
with the pursuit of pleasure.
Fortunately, there is
a healing power that is greater than any of these ills. Unfortunately, this power does not promise an
immediate cure, it cannot be legislated, and it cannot be enforced by any power
on earth. Yet it is our only hope, and
it is a great and mighty hope for it for it lies in the great and mighty, the infinite
and eternal, it lies with the one who made the heavens and the earth, it lies
with the one who so loved us he gave his only Son that we might not die, but
have true and eternal life.
Jesus tells us the
secret in today’s gospel – love God with all your heart, all your soul, all
your mind, and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. There is much more that he tells us, but the
rest is mere details – look to the lilies of the field and the sparrows in the
sky, you cannot serve both God and mammon, love your enemy, pray for those who
persecute you, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, forgive not
once or twice, but seventy-seven times, judge not, blessed are the merciful,
for they shall receive mercy, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the
stranger, love one another as I have loved you, etc., etc., etc.
For Jesus the most
important laws are those that we don’t even imagine as laws. Who could think of a law that would require
somebody to love? That would be
ludicrous. Certainly, laws can
discourage us from doing evil, simply by imposing punishments that may make us
think twice. Yet laws cannot force us
to do good. Laws cannot force us to want
to do good. Laws cannot force us to love.
Yet Christian love –
the ardent desire and will for the good of the other without regard to the good
of oneself – makes God’s kingdom visible here on earth. God loves each one of us with such love. God’s will is that each one of us, in turn,
offers such love to one another. Such
love – nothing more, nothing less – will heal even the great disease that now
plaques our culture.
When we turn away
from that love, when we depend and trust on mere earthly pleasure to make us
happy, when we depend and trust on self-interest, on our own wills and on our
man-made laws to secure our liberty and out freedom, we become slaves to the
finite and the temporal. St. Paul
describes the consequences in Galatians, a description that seems eerily like
our culture today – “the works of the flesh are obvious: immorality, impurity, licentiousness,
idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of
selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies,
and the like.
But when we turn
towards the love, when we submit to the Spirit of God, accepting God’s
unconditional and infinite love, loving others as God loves us; the fruits are
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and
self-control. The fruits of Jesus’
submission to God’s will offered salvation to the world. The fruits of our own submission to God will
make others aware of that salvation and healing will begin.
Death or life, the
choice is for each of us. But each of us
must make our own choice. Nobody else can
choose for you and you cannot choose for anyone else. But to simply choose life without first
choosing love is to perpetuate the dysfunction, exacerbate the disease, and
guarantee death.
First choose God and
choose love. For then Jesus Christ, the
Son of God, our Lord and Savior, assures us that the healing is sure and
certain.
Choose God. Choose love.
Norman
Roos
November
4, 2012
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