I have been noticing contradictions in news stories. Since I forget them if I do not note them I will need to write them down immediately and show the good ones on Inconvenient Facts and Pictures web page. Contradictions and Paradoxes fill so much of our life that we need to accept them and learn from them. My son Peter taught me a lot about contradictions or paradoxes that cause him so much pain and suffering.
It is a contradiction that top paid administrators at Marquette University would spend so much time and money to get one person banned from praying in the library of the lobby while letting the others go so they can avoid the message of all that Marquette Teaches Killing. In fact in 2009, the first year of our praying in the library each week for an hour during Lent the now assistant administrator of the Center for Peace Studies, who initiated the banning order for me, was a participant in our prayer vigils in the library. Peacemaker at MU bans peacemaker?
The other paradox I must face in my daily life is that a few of the persons who preach at Church about having concern about the poor and marginalized are silent to our Cry of the Poor Petition. I guess it is one thing to talk about serving the poor and marginalizing and doing it.
Today Pat, my wife, and I made six St. Vincent De Paul home visits to families in need. At one of the calls we met a women with lots of basic needs. Due to lack of money we can only help with two major items and she was in need of three. We asked her to pick two of the three and the one she left out was a bed for her seven year old child who is sleeping on a box spring. The seven year was not home but her six month old sister was there. At the end of the visit I told the six month old girl that when I won the lottery I would come back to buy her sister a bed. The three adults laughed and the mother said that if she won the lottery she would look us up and treat us to something special. Even the baby was smiling.
Then I remembered the parish we were representing on this home visit had won the lottery, got 1.1 million dollars from sale of three Catholic Churches in North Central Milwaukee. Yet some leaders of the church were ignoring the Cry of the Poor Petition, the parable Thy Kingdom come…on earth as it is Heaven and the Proposal from the Parable. One Catholic Church hierarchy even told me that we should spend our energy raising one million dollars for home visits and forget about using the million that was already in stewardship with our parish for poor and marginalized in the areas where the money came from.
I think paradoxes are good contradictions and the many contradictions we see in everyday life are failures to put into action what we say in words. As St. Francis of Assisi is attributed to saying, “Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words”
Comments
(:commentboxchrono:)