Fr. Jack Herklotz’s homily at St. Joe’s on Victoria Day weekend

Fr. Jack

Do a Google search of May 21/22, 2011 and you’ll find some interesting things scheduled for this week-end: It is Victoria Day Long week-end with lots of out-door events around the capital region. Stanley Cup play-offs! Baseball! It’s the day the world will end. Lady Gaga will be on Saturday Night Live tonight/last night. Elvis Costello in concert at Madison Square Garden Sunday. Wait a minute! May 21, 2011 is the day the world will end! I’m not sure how we missed more advanced notice on that.

Apparently one Christian preacher has been trying to warn us, and Jesus also told us that he would come back for us. It just wasn’t clear that Jesus had an exact date in mind. So, instead of panicking, we’d be wise to follow his advice and let not our hearts be troubled. The hour and day of our deaths or Jesus’ Second Coming are not important; what’s important is being faithful. Love the Lord, do his works, being a beacon of hope to those who are cloaked in the darkness of fear, neglect, disease, and despair, and there will be a place for us in God’s house whenever moving time comes. Easier said than done! Jesus tried to comfort us by saying, “Don’t be troubled, have faith in God and faith in me.” Historically, it’s been hard for us to hear those words of comfort. It’s been hard for us not to be troubled.

During the Christian Middle Ages, earthly life was a struggle but it was lived in the secure hope of continuing in heaven (if it was lived right and that might bring about a certain amount of stress). But after the age of Enlightenment dawned and now in our Post- modern World immersed in secularism, a radical belief in the power of reason alone makes God an improbable theory and heaven merely a childish hope for many people. I was just reading this week where Stephen Hawking said the afterlife is just a fairy tale. Of course, some kind of superpower could be handy. God could be useful in controlling people’s behaviour, so for many people, religion meant doing the right thing, living a disciplined moral life. There were also a number of people who thought that God made the world and then disappeared and left it on its own, a remote detached God.

Living without God may seem to be enlightened, fashionable, and reasonable, but it does very little to feed a hungry soul. Some people are reassured by various theologians, who say that religion is neither knowledge nor living morally; religion is basically “a taste for the infinite” as German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher put it. And the most radical human response is a feeling of dependence on that infinity, on our Creator. Now that might be a counterpoint to a moralizing, distant God; but it is too vague and flowery for others. The great, gloomy theologian Paul Tillich was a battlefield medic in World War I who daily buried mutilated friends and heard the bullets whiz by his head in the trenches. God had to be just as real as that war was traumatizing, and so the normal response was anxiety. People are anxious about many things: the loss of their hair, the shape of their bodies, and the miniscule size of their bank accounts. But there are deeper, existential anxieties, so deep that they are more general feelings
than individual experiences.

It is scary to live in time, since each day brings us closer to death. Time eats away at beauty, power, wealth, and fame, leaving us in the end with absolutely nothing. (You know, at one time I used to be a good looking
fellow). We erect carefully constructed and elaborate defenses: insurance plans, wills, pensions; but when all of these defenses are shattered, we become aware of the brutal truth that there is no defence against time. We
experience the shock of “non-being.” We also live in space, but that space is insecure. Houses burn, just ask the
folks who lost their houses in Northern Alberta forest fires. If you live a few hundred miles east in Manitoba or in parts of Quebec, land and dwellings may be washed away by flood. If you live in the Mid-East, your homeland could be taken through war. And one could live practically anywhere on our planet and lose his or her job because of a weak and wavering economy. We are all rooted someplace in space, but no place is absolutely safe, no ground is totally immune to earthquake. We are thrown into existence in one place and pulled out of existence at another place. And between those places, we are never completely secure and so that leaves us anxious.

Finally, our existence is conditional. Everything was made because someone wanted to make it. No single thing and no individual person has a right to be. When we think of how unnecessary we are, how inconsequential our lives are, we shiver to think of how close we are to not being. When we finally awake to our precarious existence and face our anxiety, we have a choice. We can let our hearts be troubled or we can have faith in God and faith in Jesus. We can humbly accept that we are unnecessary, and yet here we are. Someone must think we are worth creating. Someone must love us. Yes, time nips at our heels; but when that time runs out, we fall into the loving embrace of our Creator. Faith is always a choice. We can be discouraged by all the evil in the world and say, “Why do awful things happen to us? Why does God hate me?” Or, we can look in awe at the wonder of creation and say along with Mary, “Let it be done to me as you say.”