A REFLECTION FOR SEXAGESIMA SUNDAY
How
many times do we ask a Catholic teacher, even a nun or a priest, ‘how can that
be?’ We don’t understand a particular
article of our faith, and so we “ask the experts,” hoping, expecting even, to
get an answer that makes sense of our questioning. “How is it possible for God to be three
Persons and yet only one God?” “Why does
God allow this or that evil to exist?” “What
does it mean that our souls will go to heaven or hell for all eternity.” We don’t get it, we want to see the
answers, but no matter how hard we work our brains, we still just don’t understand. So we ask.
And then we get the worn-out old phrase that we’ve learned to shrug off,
“It’s a mystery.”
There are, on the other hand, those supernatural mysteries mentioned above, to which we will never know the answer, which we will forever fail to fully understand. Our limited, finite minds can never fully comprehend infinity, eternity and true perfection. We may have words for them, but finite brains cannot grasp the infinite.
Like a wretched schoolboy who refuses to believe his teacher when she explains that the earth revolves on its axis, simply because he looks around and doesn’t experience the sensation of movement, people sometimes refuse to believe God for the same reason that some of the things he has revealed are not apparent to our senses. We have no other confirmation than our blind faith that, for example, our souls will live forever, whatever “forever” means. But it is this very faith that will save those souls of ours. We are pleasing to God when we trust that he can neither deceive nor be deceived. We become ever closer to him by assenting with our faith even to those truths that we don’t and never will understand.
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