Thursday, March 12, 2009

Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina Current mood:thoughtful
There has been a lot of hullaballoo about some bishop somewhere (Germany?) who made a statement that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for sin, or something to that effect. Of course people were up in arms--how dare this man have an opinion! Especially in America (the only country I know of that actually voted in their dictator, rather than making him put together a military coup) the cries of outrage went up.Now I do not believe people in New Orleans are any guiltier of sin than, say, people in Seattle or Boise. Rejecting God's laws is popular all across the good ol' US of A! And as my mom used to say, "The innocent suffer along with the guilty." (I have changed that to "the innocent usually suffer a lot more than the guilty," but that's just me.)I am of the mindset that ANY natural disaster, or even unnatural disaster, is a call to repentance for EVERYONE, regardless of whether one was affected or not.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

The Lord's Prayer and greed

From a talk on the Lord's Prayer by Father Reginald Martin, O.P.:

"If we consider what we ask of God when we beg for our daily bread, we realize we are asking for very little. We are not asking God to supply all our wants, which can be infinite; we are asking Him to supply our needs, which are far more modest.

"St. John Chrysostom continually preached against the excesses he witnessed at the Byzantine court. In these words of the Lord's Prayer he took the opportunity to warn his listeners, once again, about the hazards of wealth. In a sermon on the gospel of Matthew he preached, '...it is neither for riches, nor for delicate living, nor for costly raiment, nor for any other such thing, but for bread only that He commanded us to make our prayer.'

"The Lord's Prayer, thus, encourages us to seek simplicity in our lives, and the virtue of Fortitude helps us trust that this simplicity will be sufficient for our needs. In this way, Fortitude enables us to avoid the sins that arise from too great a desire for temporal goods."