Reflection for Monday, September 27, 2004: 26th week in Ordinary Time.
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Kestermeier, Chas, S.J.
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2004-09-27
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en_US
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Job speaks at the end of this passage of the "men whose path is hidden from them, and whom God has hemmed in." There are two points of view here, that of the individual human considering his or her state and that of the same person assigning a cause for this. ||People are complex, to say the least. If I were to describe a human being I would say that each person exists as an individual, literally indivisible, but possessing such diverse powers and qualities as intellect, memory, will, imagination, desire(s), emotions, senses, and a body, not to mention our penchant for sin balanced by our perfectability. We experience a certain looseness about all of this, a certain dispersion: we literally do not have it all together with anything like the simplicity and transparency that God does. We struggle to make all of those elements fit together, but in spite of our efforts and even real growth we discover that we are a mystery to ourselves, our path at least partially hidden from us. |Various men and women have faced this problem and the different aspects of it and found our lives futile, absurd, and eventually without hope. Woody Allen, for example, pointed in this direction when he said "I don't know whether God exists or not, but if he does he is certainly an underachiever." Others have looked at the same evidence and experience and seen us as a work in progress, a creation being conducted by Someone else but in which we have the dignity of cooperating.|To put it briefly, we are a mystery to ourselves, a magnificent gift that we will spend eternity discovering the beauty of, but for now we must work in faith and in hope with God to make the most of that gift, to actively choose our lives as opportunity, as a gift to share, as a sign of hope --- not complete here and now but always still coming to us. The mystery of that gift is where we can encounter the mystery of the Giver. He does not hem us in but patiently helps us to develop our gifts, to respond to our desire for him, and to find our true and complete selves. |To disagree with the disagreeable Job, while our path is indeed partially hidden from us, God has not hemmed us in: he is the Shepherd he leads us through this darkness to where we need to go and where we will be filled with his delight.
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University Ministry, Creighton University.
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These reflections may not be sold or used commercially without permission. Personal or parish use is permitted.
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Lectionary number: 455