Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 9:46am

This May Help…a Little

Are you shell-shocked? Don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of “bombshells”; from new headlines in the abuse scandal to sudden and historic changes to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

This may help (a little). I recently had a discussion with my fourteen year old daughter about why we are sometimes forced to go through things we don’t want to go through; it relates to the problem of evil. Why does God permit it?

The classic answer to this classic problem is that God allows certain evils in order to bring out the greater good. I admit that the discussion with my daughter had more to do with the evil of math homework than any kind of scandal, but we both found the following reflection helpful in understanding the role of “trust” when going through a difficult time not of our own doing and not of our own choosing…

“Facing various possibilities, it is good for us to choose among them. Yet perhaps the highest and most rewarding exercise of freedom is assenting to things we haven’t chosen, welcoming in trust realities that transcend us.

Our real prison is ourselves: our limited perception of reality, our narrow-mindedness and narrow-­heartedness. Experience often shows that we break out of this prison and open new horizons in accepting situations we haven’t chosen and so come to perceive a deeper dimension of reality, more rich and more beautiful.”1

Maybe God is beginning a process to purify his Church into something more beautiful that will take decades, or maybe we should brace ourselves for something quicker in the realm of  “Shock & Awe”.

  1. Jacques Philippe, Fire & Light: Learning to Receive the gift of God, (New York: Scepter Publishing, Inc. 2016) ebook
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c matt
c matt
Wednesday, August 29, AD 2018 8:03am

I always understood that evil is allowed because free will is real. God can bring greater good out if it, but that is not why He allows it (that is more “making lemonade out of lemons”). If there were no consequences to our choices, then we would not truly have free will, and we could not be morally responsible agents. In essence, we would lose the divine image and be no more than pets rather than children of God.

As for the math homework “evil” – I would tell my kids it’s no different than exercise. If you want to score that winning goal for the team at the last minute, you have to do a lot of running and practice weeks before to get there.

c matt
c matt
Wednesday, August 29, AD 2018 1:00pm

This also helps me a bit:

A truly top-to-bottom remodeling project starts with . . . demolition day.

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