“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” Psalm 95: 8
My wife, Pat, and I both reported headaches today. I am not sure if it is a result of ‘noise’ from last week in Disney World or something else. By ‘noise’ of Disney World I do not only mean sounds but all the lights and action coming at you all the time. It is like you are part of a non-stop parade where you need to keep going to keep going.
Coming home I find myself catching up, doing the laundry, grocery shopping, preparing dinner, picking up the house, calling people and being called, gardening, writing and all the little stuff that makes for a busy day. But the difference between this busy day and last week is the constant ‘noise’. Here I can stop when I want, quiet myself and find the silence at the heart of my being. It is easier to be discipline in this busy life than in the noisy world of last week. I realize that a world with silence at its heart makes discipline easier than a world with noise at its heart.
I heard today that our local Catholic Church decided to take the 1.1 million dollars of abundance that came to it from results of closing another Catholic Church in North Central Milwaukee and put it into an endowment fund for future church use rather than use it for the works of mercy. Greed, getting all the stuff or money you can get, seems to have infiltrated the Catholic Church as well as the secular world around us. No poor person, in reality or spirit, is safe in this world of acquisitions, getting more and more and greed.
In the 60’s we fought for open housing for Milwaukee. We got the law we sought but lost the war since the very area we fought from is now the most segregated part of the most segregated city in the USA.
In the 90’s in our Catholic Church we talked and talked about the “preferential option for the poor” and now in Milwaukee the Catholic Church takes money out of the poorest neighborhood in the four poorest city for the endowment, for future use.
Maybe we all have grown deaf from all the ‘noise’ of the world and we no longer hear the Word of God that is spoken to us. If we cannot hear, see and touch the presence of God in the world, especially in the poor and marginalized, perhaps we have grown hard of heart.
Comments
Please send any comments on this post to . Let us know which day’s post your comments pertain to. If the comments are appropriate we will post them here for you.