Human fires are ablaze, exploding beyond the bounds of human frustration, scorching the earth with divisiveness, vengeance, greed, rapaciousness, robbery, cruelty, murder. Human desperation seems intent upon burning up the world in fury, because it finds that nothing in the world can satisfy the human heart.
We cannot satisfy one another, nor can we repair the injuries we inflict on one another. So we entrench ourselves in opposing factions and continue to tear one another apart.
An eclipse of ugliness is upon many places in the world, covering over many facets of life with shadows. For too long we have sought this darkness, to cover over everything in reality that cannot be controlled by our own power. We have wanted to indulge the illusion that we are answerable to nothing beyond ourselves, that we are the masters of our own individual universes. Yet we cannot control our inevitable conflicts with others who grasp for the same power, and so we burn against one another.
This is what is at the core of our social problems, our political catastrophes, our wars. Our violence is a sign that we don't know why we're alive, and that we're frustrated and desperate in the face of our failure to generate our own identities and purposes for living.
But why are we alive?
We have been created and called to find our fulfillment in the Infinite Mystery of God. We are given freedom so that we might grow in love as we journey toward God through history together with those who have been entrusted to us. But we are so indigent, so terribly vulnerable, so desperately in need. We stand before one other like open wounds, aching for "something" we don't know how to articulate, nor how to give to one another.
We are aching with our need for the love of God, and we will never have peace if we try to live our lives and organize the world pretending that God doesn't exist.
But where can we hope to find God?
It is Jesus Christ who brings us God, brings us healing, and brings us together.
