The Year That Was

 

This past year has been absolute hell. I have no more patience, if I ever did, for the Hallelujah chorus Christians with their happy happy joy joy attitude. There is, as Ecclesiastes says, a time for joy, but it must not be unrelenting. There is also a time to mourn.

Suppose God has indeed been good to you. Can you ignore the millions who died in Hitler's camps, or on Pol Pot’s killing fields? Will you dance on the unmarked graves of the millions of unborn? Can you ignore those two little abandoned leper girls living in a makeshift tent in the Liloan churchyard? 

I'm not saying you should rush off a cheque or join a protest. That sort of thing is fine too, but you know perfectly well, if you are an adult, that it does not change much. It just makes you feel a little better, and perhaps you shouldn’t. It hardly feels moral to declare this world relentlessly wonderful in front of two little leper girls. It seems callous. Truth must be our aim, not comfortable dishonesty.

A few years ago, young and innocent, my daughter wrote a Mother's Day card thanking her mom for, among other things, not aborting her. Canadian friends, all pro-abortion, were alarmed. What a thing to think! Has she not been sufficiently assured she was loved and wanted? 

They miss the point; perhaps deliberately. Abortion is not okay simply because it turns out I was not aborted. Others were; I might have been. There but for the grace of God …

Evil is real, evil is evil, and evil is powerful. It is the more powerful the more we pretend it is not there.

Blessed are those who mourn. There is something wrong with anyone who does not. Our hope is in a better world. 

Do we have assurance of a better world? There is no proof of heaven. There is no historical proof that Jesus even existed, let alone was God incarnate. Even great saints like Mother Teresa or St. Therese have admitted doubt. And even if it is all true, we have no right to expect that we will achieve the goal.

Yet we know that things ought to be better. We are aware that they are deeply wrong. That is our warrant that something more is possible. That in itself seems adequate to explain evil in the world. Were we never to experience darkness, we could not be aware of the light. Were we never to experience ugliness, we could not conceive of beauty. Were we never to experience evil, we could not know heaven.

Lose our sense of discontent, that hunger and thirst after righteousness, and all is lost.