fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
It's not God's fault
Philip V. Brennan
Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2006
There is an old joke about a man whose whole life was beset by awful tragedies. He married three times, worshipped each wife, and they all met tragic ends, suffering agonizing deaths while still young. He was consoled by his love for his three daughters, upon whom he doted, but one by one they died young in tragic ways, one of a drug overdose, a second in a car accident, and the third committed suicide.
He survived all of these horrors each time by burying himself in work at the job he loved. On the day of his last daughter's funeral he hastened to his office to find refuge from his terrible ordeals only to find the door barred and a sign stating that the company was out of business.
Dazed, he staggered down the street and found himself in a nearby church, where he knelt before the altar to pray. Suddenly the roof collapsed and buried him under tons of rubble. As he lay there dying, he looked up to heaven and moaned, "Why?"
A voice from above thundered, "I'm sorry, but you just bug me."
When you look around at what's been happening recently, a clear threat of impending nuclear holocausts, bombing and beheadings, butchery and terror in the Middle East, a climate gone bonkers, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, sons killing their parents and siblings, students in a small school massacred by a deranged killer, a whole family butchered on a Florida roadside, young children and women abducted, sexually abused and killed, all in the space of a few weeks, you have to wonder if all of this is a sign that we are bugging a vengeful God and are suffering the consequences of His wrath.
While it may be comforting to lay the blame for the violence and discord afflicting us on a wrathful God socking it to us big time, the truth is that we have nobody to blame but ourselves. The good Lord has nothing to do with the out-of-control chaos. We do it all by ourselves.
All our loving Father asks of us is that we put ourselves in His gentle hands and leave everything up to Him. I have a sign on my desk that reads "Good Morning, this is God. I will be handling your problems today. I will not need your help. So relax and have a great day."
He means just what He says. In the Lord's prayer we say "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven." His will applies to each and every single one of us, and when we abandon ourselves to his will, like children we put ourselves fully and completely in His hands and leave everything else to Him. He guides and instructs us and we are never on our own or abandoned to our own meager devices.
This is no guarantee that unpleasant and even tragic things will not happen to us when we place ourselves within the bosom of His protection, but He has his reasons for everything and if we suffer in some way it is because it is necessary for our spiritual or even material well-being.
It has been said that God punishes those He loves most – leading St. Catherine of Sienna to remark, "That's why He has so few friends." Real friends, however, don't hesitate to knock us on the head with a two-by-four when we need it.
I recall a dear friend and colleague who was destroying himself with an addiction to booze. He wound up in the gutter, jobless and broke, and beyond hope. That's what it took to bring him to join AA and regain much of what he had lost.
He often said that his friends allowed him to destroy his life by never trying to stop him from his destructive binging, even to lending him money and thus allowing him to go on destroying himself. It took God to do that, and God did it by letting him literally end up lying face down in the gutter, where he was finally faced with the need to decide to live or to die.
Like any loving father, God lays down rules for His children – in this case the Ten Commandments – and asks only that we adhere to them, not because He wants to put shackles on us but because there are reasons why violating them will inevitably harm us even though we often do not understand those reasons.
A small child might wonder why his parents warn him not to play with matches, unaware that they are making him avoid such behavior not because they want to spoil his fun but because they know how dangerous it can be.
As a loving parent, God warns us against certain acts and behavior – restrictions that may not make sense to our finite minds – and we often fail to understand why, unable to grasp the fact that in His Divine wisdom He knows the harm they can cause us and those around us.
For the same reason, He wants us to abandon ourselves to Him and His Divine will. After all, He knows what's best for us. And what's ultimately best for us is to someday join Him in paradise. That's the only reason we were born and the reason behind everything the Lord allows to happen to us.
Our eternal salvation is all He wants. Everything else is subordinate to it. If it takes an occasional two-by-four to the side of our heads, then a two-by-four it will be.
God created this universe, and just as he laid down rules for us, he laid down rules for the universe and everything in it. We call those rules "natural law" and they govern not just the universe and the world around us but also all of us in within it.
Every single problem that affects mankind results from violation of natural law. And because natural law places restraints on our appetites, desires and ambitions, modern man has decided to insist that there is either no such thing as natural law or that we are perfectly justified in ignoring it. When we do, the fault for the consequences that follow lies solely with us.
Many look at natural law as one great philosopher whose name escapes me looked at God himself, saying, "If it could be mathematically proven that God exists, I would still deny it because it puts a limit on my intellect." The same could be said for natural law – it puts a limit on our animal passions, intellects and desires. It tells us that we are not the masters of the universe, but children of the Lord, upon whom we are utterly dependent.
Look around you at the chaos we have created by turning our backs on our Father, His commandments, and His natural law. Since we have told God to butt out of our lives, he has graciously allowed us to be on our own, even to removing His restraining hand and allowing nature to take its destructive course.
An example: It is God's will expressed in the Bible and inherent in natural law that a man and a woman marry, have and raise children, and provide for them a safe and secure haven in which they can grow and mature and have their needs provided for until they are old enough to care for themselves apart from the home.
Natural law declares, therefore, that marriages be permanent arrangements, and for good reason. Only when they are permanent can the offspring of the union be properly safeguarded and raised. Their parents' commitment is their guarantee that they will be sheltered, loved and provided for until they reach adulthood.
When natural law is violated and the parents part and go their separate ways, that guarantee is forever shattered, and the children suffer a shattering of the illusion that they are cherished and protected within the sanctity of their parents' union, and are left with emotional and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. Their needs have been subjugated to their parents' willfulness and selfishness that has caused them to put their own needs and desires over the welfare of the children they have brought into this world.
All this in addition to the psychological scars borne by the spouses, especially wives tossed aside to satisfy their husbands' lust for new and different wives.
Modern man has told God in no uncertain terms that he is no longer interested in what He wills. It is our will that counts. We have torn the rudder from the ship of life, and are amazed to find ourselves adrift in a raging sea growing wilder and ever more violent.
Much of mankind has chosen to be on their own, and like a lost child wandering in the wilderness, they are directionless and without the guiding hand and the enduring love of their eternal Father. Like a mariner in ancient times, we are heading for that point in the oceans beyond which, as the old map warned, "there be dragons."
Pater noster, qui es in caelis sanctificetur nomen tuum; Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra.
In case you are wondering, that's from the Lord's Prayer. "Our Father who art in heaven, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven."
And when it is, then it will be Heaven on earth. Until then, there just be dragons.
Philip V. Brennan
Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2006
There is an old joke about a man whose whole life was beset by awful tragedies. He married three times, worshipped each wife, and they all met tragic ends, suffering agonizing deaths while still young. He was consoled by his love for his three daughters, upon whom he doted, but one by one they died young in tragic ways, one of a drug overdose, a second in a car accident, and the third committed suicide.
He survived all of these horrors each time by burying himself in work at the job he loved. On the day of his last daughter's funeral he hastened to his office to find refuge from his terrible ordeals only to find the door barred and a sign stating that the company was out of business.
Dazed, he staggered down the street and found himself in a nearby church, where he knelt before the altar to pray. Suddenly the roof collapsed and buried him under tons of rubble. As he lay there dying, he looked up to heaven and moaned, "Why?"
A voice from above thundered, "I'm sorry, but you just bug me."
When you look around at what's been happening recently, a clear threat of impending nuclear holocausts, bombing and beheadings, butchery and terror in the Middle East, a climate gone bonkers, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, sons killing their parents and siblings, students in a small school massacred by a deranged killer, a whole family butchered on a Florida roadside, young children and women abducted, sexually abused and killed, all in the space of a few weeks, you have to wonder if all of this is a sign that we are bugging a vengeful God and are suffering the consequences of His wrath.
While it may be comforting to lay the blame for the violence and discord afflicting us on a wrathful God socking it to us big time, the truth is that we have nobody to blame but ourselves. The good Lord has nothing to do with the out-of-control chaos. We do it all by ourselves.
All our loving Father asks of us is that we put ourselves in His gentle hands and leave everything up to Him. I have a sign on my desk that reads "Good Morning, this is God. I will be handling your problems today. I will not need your help. So relax and have a great day."
He means just what He says. In the Lord's prayer we say "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven." His will applies to each and every single one of us, and when we abandon ourselves to his will, like children we put ourselves fully and completely in His hands and leave everything else to Him. He guides and instructs us and we are never on our own or abandoned to our own meager devices.
This is no guarantee that unpleasant and even tragic things will not happen to us when we place ourselves within the bosom of His protection, but He has his reasons for everything and if we suffer in some way it is because it is necessary for our spiritual or even material well-being.
It has been said that God punishes those He loves most – leading St. Catherine of Sienna to remark, "That's why He has so few friends." Real friends, however, don't hesitate to knock us on the head with a two-by-four when we need it.
I recall a dear friend and colleague who was destroying himself with an addiction to booze. He wound up in the gutter, jobless and broke, and beyond hope. That's what it took to bring him to join AA and regain much of what he had lost.
He often said that his friends allowed him to destroy his life by never trying to stop him from his destructive binging, even to lending him money and thus allowing him to go on destroying himself. It took God to do that, and God did it by letting him literally end up lying face down in the gutter, where he was finally faced with the need to decide to live or to die.
Like any loving father, God lays down rules for His children – in this case the Ten Commandments – and asks only that we adhere to them, not because He wants to put shackles on us but because there are reasons why violating them will inevitably harm us even though we often do not understand those reasons.
A small child might wonder why his parents warn him not to play with matches, unaware that they are making him avoid such behavior not because they want to spoil his fun but because they know how dangerous it can be.
As a loving parent, God warns us against certain acts and behavior – restrictions that may not make sense to our finite minds – and we often fail to understand why, unable to grasp the fact that in His Divine wisdom He knows the harm they can cause us and those around us.
For the same reason, He wants us to abandon ourselves to Him and His Divine will. After all, He knows what's best for us. And what's ultimately best for us is to someday join Him in paradise. That's the only reason we were born and the reason behind everything the Lord allows to happen to us.
Our eternal salvation is all He wants. Everything else is subordinate to it. If it takes an occasional two-by-four to the side of our heads, then a two-by-four it will be.
God created this universe, and just as he laid down rules for us, he laid down rules for the universe and everything in it. We call those rules "natural law" and they govern not just the universe and the world around us but also all of us in within it.
Every single problem that affects mankind results from violation of natural law. And because natural law places restraints on our appetites, desires and ambitions, modern man has decided to insist that there is either no such thing as natural law or that we are perfectly justified in ignoring it. When we do, the fault for the consequences that follow lies solely with us.
Many look at natural law as one great philosopher whose name escapes me looked at God himself, saying, "If it could be mathematically proven that God exists, I would still deny it because it puts a limit on my intellect." The same could be said for natural law – it puts a limit on our animal passions, intellects and desires. It tells us that we are not the masters of the universe, but children of the Lord, upon whom we are utterly dependent.
Look around you at the chaos we have created by turning our backs on our Father, His commandments, and His natural law. Since we have told God to butt out of our lives, he has graciously allowed us to be on our own, even to removing His restraining hand and allowing nature to take its destructive course.
An example: It is God's will expressed in the Bible and inherent in natural law that a man and a woman marry, have and raise children, and provide for them a safe and secure haven in which they can grow and mature and have their needs provided for until they are old enough to care for themselves apart from the home.
Natural law declares, therefore, that marriages be permanent arrangements, and for good reason. Only when they are permanent can the offspring of the union be properly safeguarded and raised. Their parents' commitment is their guarantee that they will be sheltered, loved and provided for until they reach adulthood.
When natural law is violated and the parents part and go their separate ways, that guarantee is forever shattered, and the children suffer a shattering of the illusion that they are cherished and protected within the sanctity of their parents' union, and are left with emotional and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. Their needs have been subjugated to their parents' willfulness and selfishness that has caused them to put their own needs and desires over the welfare of the children they have brought into this world.
All this in addition to the psychological scars borne by the spouses, especially wives tossed aside to satisfy their husbands' lust for new and different wives.
Modern man has told God in no uncertain terms that he is no longer interested in what He wills. It is our will that counts. We have torn the rudder from the ship of life, and are amazed to find ourselves adrift in a raging sea growing wilder and ever more violent.
Much of mankind has chosen to be on their own, and like a lost child wandering in the wilderness, they are directionless and without the guiding hand and the enduring love of their eternal Father. Like a mariner in ancient times, we are heading for that point in the oceans beyond which, as the old map warned, "there be dragons."
Pater noster, qui es in caelis sanctificetur nomen tuum; Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra.
In case you are wondering, that's from the Lord's Prayer. "Our Father who art in heaven, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven."
And when it is, then it will be Heaven on earth. Until then, there just be dragons.