Be Sensible!

The tragedy today is that man and woman have become deaf and blind to the fact that they are accountable to God for how they treat human life from conception to natural death and that the earth is to be used for the benefit of all men and women.

God revealed in the Book of Genesis that He created man and woman to be the high point of His earthly creation. After He created man and woman He declared them “very good” as distinct from the rest of creation, which He calls “good” (Gen 1:31). Creation is good while man and woman are very good. Another mark of distinction between man and the rest of creation was that God created them in His “image and likeness,” (Gen 1:26-28) while the rest wasn’t so privileged. God created man and woman as unique creatures and received the special purpose of subdue and filling the earth as its stewards (Gn 1:28). The tragedy today is that man and woman have become deaf and blind to the fact that they are accountable to God for how they treat human life from conception to natural death and that the earth is to be used for the benefit of all men and women.

   Through human beings God puts His stamp, as it were, on His creation. This is why He created us in His image and likeness. Therefore, we must be continuously conscious of ourselves as God’s image and likeness to make sure that we are God’s instruments through which He continues to influence and direct His creation. If we are deaf and blind to God’s revelation we will stamp creation with our own human image and impose our own limitations and sinfulness upon it.

   Our job, then, is to use creation in a manner that it too reflects the spirit of the Creator and shows that indeed we, as its stewards, show that we are God’s image and likeness on this earth. How do we know what it means to be the image and likeness of God? Who can tell and show us God’s image and likeness? God Himself made His image and likeness audible and visible when His Word took on human nature in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Jesus is God’s Word-made-flesh. Jesus is the visible Model of what it means to be the human image and likeness of God. Therefore to be God’s image and likeness in the world you and I must make it our business to turn our eyes and ears to Jesus Christ who is present in His Church until the end of time (Mt 28:20).

   To live calls for exercising all our abilities and gifts. God has gifted us with the ability to think and to choose. Thinking involves the mind whose nature is to know the truth. Choosing involves the will whose nature is to choose the good. The will is very much influenced by the mind since the good that is chosen is what the mind knows. Knowledge of the truth is an essential pursuit if we want to choose what’s truly good. Ignorance sentences us to less than the best. Since God is truth and is omniscient, all-knowing, He created us to know the truth. It’s unnatural for a human being not to want to know the truth.

   Knowing always begins with experience. Everything that happens to us begins as an experience – either as a word or an event in our life. If we don’t experience something, it has no meaning for us. How do we experience it? With our senses. To experience something we must see, hear, smell, taste, or touch it. God has created us as sensible creatures. The animal level of creation has senses too, but it’s limited since animals, birds, and fish do not have the ability to reflect and evaluate what they sense. Only humans can reflect on and make decisions on what to do with their experiences.

   A sensible person is one who uses one’s his or her senses to the fullest in order to collect as much information as possible about his or her environments. When we describe something as “nonsense” we imply that one or more of the senses contradicts it. When I say that something doesn’t make sense, I’m implying that it doesn’t square with what I see, hear,, smell, taste, or touch. When parents tell their children to be sensible, consciously or unconsciously they want them to use all their senses to collect correct information so they can make good decisions. If God gave us at least five senses, He means for us to use them so that we can make good decisions based on the sense knowledge we have cleaned. Seeing and hearing are two of our most important senses helping us to be secure and productive.

     Jesus came to restore us to our senses, both physically and spiritually. This Sunday Jesus’ Church draws our attention to Him as He restores hearing and speech to a man who had lost the use of both (Mk 7:31-37).  “He took the man away from the crowd, put His finger in the man’s ears, and using His spittle, touched his tongue. “He looked up to Heaven, groaned and said to the man, ‘Ephphatha – Be opened.’”  Jesus was fulfilling the prophecy from Isaiah (34:5-7): “Be strong, fear not! Here is your God … He comes to save you. Then will the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf be cleared … the tongue of the mute will sing…” Here we see how the impairment of one sense affects the others. The healing or development of one sense enhances the others. When a person is deaf his or her speech is also adversely affected. When a person hears well he or she is able to speak more plainly.

   An old saying reminds that “There are none so deaf as those who don’t want to hear.” The same goes for seeing. Hearing is a very important sense when it comes to the Christian faith. The Holy Spirit reveals through St. Paul, “Faith comes through hearing and hearing comes through speaking the Word of God” (Rom 10:17). Deafness, not just physical but especially mental, emotional, moral, and social, causes faith in God to die because it guarantees that His Word is not heard. Reluctance to preach the Word by bishops and clergy causes faith in God to die. If the Word isn’t spoken it can’t be heard and if it isn’t heard it cannot remind and encourage the hearer to be what God wants him or her to be, namely His image and likeness in the world. Deafness to the Word of God and impediments to speaking it are sure causes of the faith crisis in the Church today.

   As a result of not hearing God’s Word people become spiritually dumb and insensitive to what God offers them, namely freedom from sin, the ability to see Jesus in the Sacraments of His Church, especially the Holy Mass, companionship to the lonely, hope to the despairing, love to the, loveless, faith to the faithless, protection to the vulnerable, the orphan, the widow, and thwarts the wicked (Ps 146:7-10).

   Our prayer daily must be, “Heavenly Father, please open the ears and mouths of the bishops and clergy of Your Church so that I might hear You and know how to speak Your Word to all I know, so that, using their senses, they might be filled with Your Love and realise that You have created them in Your Holy Image and Likeness to bring back the world to Him. I ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ Your Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen!