REFLECTION FROM THE LAND OF GENESIS! Way back in the land of Genesis, God entrusted newly created men and women with the care of the earth. God tells them to be stewards of creation. Also in the land of Genesis lurked a serpent who led us into the very tempting world of sin. At the heart of that sin is the alluring world of the human ego, with all its needs, wants, noisy desires and the brilliant gift of rationalising anything that suits this inflamed ego. The world of sin seemed like fun. The world of sin seemed to be a place of liberation, where all our needs and wants could be met, and we could build structures to help us hide from the consequences of the choices we had made. There were sufficient numbers of us in the world of sin to protect us from asking ourselves too many hard questions, as we had many others who lived, thought and chose the same way we did. We figured we couldn’t be spectators in our own culture and so the obvious choice was to join in, and try to be as good as the rest of the tribe in living the life of comfort, wealth, freedom and ease that our ego had made necessary. Our structures became very complex, as we turned ourselves into cities, nations and religions so that we would have some kind of safety together and some sort of common “morality” to help us all get on with our quest for wealth, salvation, ownership and power. This sin is original in the sense that it originates way back in the land of Genesis. It is anything but original inasmuch as we all love to dabble in it, though I suppose we can each argue that we bring our own spark of genius to the pursuits that original sin encourages in us. We no longer live in the land of Genesis. However we play the same songs we did back then, the songs that boost our ego, that anaesthetise our guilt, that deaden our conscience when its voice becomes too uncomfortable. What is it about our ego that is so destructive? On our Villa Maria staff retreat last week we heard a slightly corny but telling description of ego. Ego, we heard stands for “Edging God Out”. Given that something that sounds corny can still contain a deep truth, it’s worth pondering. The heart of our original sin is our unwillingness to allow God to be at the centre of our choosing, our relationships, our work, our very breathing. God can turn our Genesis world on its ear, but we find it pretty hard to bite the bullet and allow that to happen. So we persist in living with the illusion that we actually own things, when in fact they are only on loan for us to care for and act as stewards in their regard. We still imagine that our personal, family, church and national structures justify our blindness to the world’s hunger, the world’s violence, the world awash with refugees. And yet we still hanker for God, for justice, for the freedom to live differently and for the courage to create a world in which we are stewards rather than owners. Is it too late to turn things around, or is there an opportunity still for us to turn original sin into original grace? The election campaign is already awash with ego. Can we bring another kind of voice to the conversations around the election issues as a small start? God be with us still as we seek to be good stewards Father Kevin
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 23:00:00 +0000
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