Understanding love
Podcasting
Scripture readings
Reflection
This weekend, Canadians are observing a National Aboriginal Day, a time for our First Nations to share various aspects of their culture – music, food and art to begin with - with non-Aboriginals. In Sudbury, National Aboriginal Day is being celebrated in Bell Park on Sunday with a Pow Wow (a big party) that will take place throughout most of the day.
This Sunday is also Fathers’ Day, the one day of the year when we remember and pay tribute to our fathers, to thank them for their guidance, for sharing their wisdom with us, for their love and for everything they do for us.
Have you ever noticed that there are some things in life that we only pay attention to when there is trouble? For many years now, efforts have been made to build relations between the First Nations population and other Canadians, but many still have no idea who the Aboriginals are, other than people we identify in the street, or hear about from distant parts of the country.
Many of us may be very fortunate to have good loving relationships with our parents and the rest of our families, but for some, this is not so. Even when things are good, we often pay little attention to the presence of wisdom people such as our parents except when we want something or when life gets tough.
And then there’s God … Remember him? How many of us go through life not sparing any effort or time to check in with Him, to thank Him for the good weather, for our good fortune, for the blessings of our family and friends? Often it’s only when we encounter the storms of life (Mk 4:37-38) that we run to him, begging and pleading.
Faith is mysterious business. The disciples called out for help, and he immediately came to their help. Why is it then that God sometimes seems not to answer our prayers when we call out for help? In truth, we will only know the answer to this question when we get to heaven. Only then will we understand the true measure of his love. In the meanwhile, what matters is our response to his love.
We can choose either to engage in the futile denial of the value of life like Job did, but then we risk the possibility that God will answer us too with more questions that we can never answer (Job 38:1-11), or we can respond in faith and be inspired by hope.
For his part, the Apostle Paul chose the latter of these, and it made all the difference in his life. Through his writings, he encouraged the Church at Corinth as he encourages us today to realize that it was out of love for us that Christ gave his life for us (2 Cor 5:14-15), and therefore we too should be inspired to live our lives devoted in love to the service of others, and striving every day to see others not as enemies but as companions who are on a journey with us until the day that we return to the Father.
God’s love may be a mystery to us, but he gives us opportunities to see his love in action, through fathers who care for their children, through people of different cultures who share our stories with each other, and through various opportunities that are provided for each of us to respond in faith and love.
