Reflection - Logical Parishioners

The logical parishioner, modern, involved, busy has infinitely more to do with Love and Prayer than the Young and the inexperienced, whether student or observer, ever imagines. Social Justice promotes a special type of love and hope unencumbered with any desire for reciprocal behavior or any desire for possession.How lucky for us that sin creates an ancient form of amnesia (inability to love God and neighbor) and a modern form of jealousy (inability to remember and to share all the goodness that I have received); you might expect that I would have enough common sense to remain quiet and to mind my own business. What makes the “new” love based upon fairness and the Social Justice teachings of Christ so appealing is its insistence to recognize that love requires a foundation of both spiritual and intellectual, prose and poetry, sound and silence, motion and stillness, ignorance and intelligence. Within all love reside many unasked questions. Love itself is often an ethereal mystery which appears and disappears within our hearts when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to be open, to look upon the world with an universal hope and concern for our neighbors which matches or exceeds our hope and concern for ourselves at a specific moment.The modern thought and acceptance of sin within some secular thinking reduces the evil within sin, reduces our responsibility for our actions. We must accept that sin is often unavoidable. We must believe that prayer and penance are always necessary.

We can allow ourselves to be part of God’s procession, surrounded by all the Saints, surrounded by angels, resplendent in love and hope, glittering with humility, charity, and obedience the most precious jewels of faith and love.

Let us reverse things. Instead of asking how we can teach social justice, suppose we ask how social justice can teach us. What might we learn from Christ’s lessons on fairness, for example, about service to the poor to which he was devoted? Some of Christ's lessons are so advanced that only the youngest and poorest will recognize them. But his ideas of love, fairness, and social justice can also teach us something personal yet perhaps revelatory: that thinking and doing matter crucially as we follow him, increase goodness and love in our lives. Again and again, he emphasizes prayer, and the need to serve others; through prayer we can find both the confidence and patience to become God’s humble, loving servants.

True, the desire to pray and to find goodness becomes an insatiable desire and you must pray. Nevertheless, you must also think . . . Contemplation, when it it true, honest, selfless leads us to Christ, opens up the beauty and majesty of his Passion which will grow stronger within each of us as our knowledge and understanding of the humiliation, suffering, and sacrifice grows. For each of us there is something of particular interest, particular meaning within Christ’s Passion which binds it to our hearts, links us to the universal Church. Allow yourself to spend fifteen minutes or more every day thinking about what the Passion means to you; allow your thoughts to be childishly chaotic, undisciplined, unfocused when you begin. This is natural; our lives are often simply a collection of episodic confusion and desperation. Contemplation and prayer can lead us to God, when we allow ourselves to be believe, when we allow ourselves to live as Jesus instructed us to live, when we allow ourselves to love.

The logical parishioner understands and accepts the illogical; love is rarely logical. The logical parishioner understands and accepts Prayer; petitioning God is a natural part of the existence of all men.We are all young and inexperienced. Each day we grow in goodness, hope, and love. And true love often remains something more beautiful, more bountiful, more mysterious than that which we allow ourselves to imagine.

Contemplation and silence.

We, you and I, with contemplation, silence, prayer, more thinking, some action can become the logical parishioners.