God writes straight with crooked lines

NOW that we are into some disasters and calamities, it’s good to remind ourselves that God writes straight with crooked lines. We need to strengthen our faith, making deliberate acts of faith to avoid letting the pillars of our ultimate beliefs eroded by the many trials and difficulties we are and will be experiencing because of them.

                God is all good, all wise, all merciful. He does not want to play tricks on us. He is not a hunter who likes to harass us and to strike us in our most vulnerable moments. He is a good father who understands us well, loves us no end, provides us with everything we need, and solves our problems in their final terms.

                He even assumes the mess that we make due to our sinfulness, and converts them into our way of reconciliation. His will and ways are actually simple and straightforward. What makes them to appear crooked are our own natural limitations, personal weaknesses and our own sinfulness that tend to complicate what is actually simple.

                The gospel gives us the basis for all these claims and beliefs. We are told to see and assess things more by faith rather than just our common sense and the power of our sciences and natural knowledge.

                “You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky; why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” he said (Lk 12,56), somehow telling us that we should not just look at the externals and appearance of things, but rather into the internal and spiritual aspects, where the interplay of God’s providence and our correspondence takes place.

                This is the challenge we have to tackle. We need to study the will and ways of God that actually are revealed to us with enough if not abundant clarity in spite of the mysteries that they also contain. Are we doing something about this challenge?

                The faith broadens our mind and leads us to brace ourselves to the full range of reality that we live in, a reality that includes the natural and the supernatural, the material and the spiritual. 

                It’s the faith that sheds the proper and ultimate light to everything in our life, including not only the good things that happen to us, our victories and successes, but also the bad and sad things that spring not so much from our natural limitations as from the infranatural or sub-human frailties that arise from our sinfulness.

                It’s the faith that gives meaning and salvation to the suffering that we unavoidably will have in this life. In another part of the gospel, for example, we are told that whenever some calamities occur, one thing that we should remember as we go about tackling the consequences of such calamities is that we need to repent.

                Our life here on earth can be described in many ways, most of them beautiful and of the fell-good type. But one realistic way of describing it is that it is also a life meant to elicit in us sentiments of repentance and conversion. That’s because of our sinfulness.

                The pertinent gospel passage is the following: “Some people told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. He said to them in reply, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?

                “By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!” (Lk 13,1-3)

                May we not get lost in the drama provoked by the calamities and disasters that visit us from time to time, a drama that inevitably sparks off strong natural feelings of fear! We have to see the whole picture painted by our faith. There we can see that God actually is conveying a beautiful message for us, a message we need to know and live.

                That’s the reason why we have to pray always. Prayer, for us, should not just be an on-and-off affair. It should be like our breathing, our very heartbeat. It’s what connects us vitally with God, and enables us to see things the way God sees them.

                We ought to remember that we actually cannot live without God. Thinking otherwise would lead us to some fantasy world that for sure cannot cope with all the fullness of the reality of our human life here on earth.

                With prayer, we somehow can detect that God actually writes straight, but his writing may look crooked because of our limitations and sinfulness.