Blog # 23 CLOSE TO GOD

Blog # 23 CLOSE TO GOD Recognizing God's presence in all of creation seems to have been one of the main causes of greatness on the part of holy men and women throughout the history of God's dealings with mankind. Holy men and women have always recognized God around them in created things, in the love and goodness of friends, in the forgiveness of injury and sin, and in all of the natural processes we know and experience. For holy men and women a beautiful sky was not just a beautiful sky but an expression and an example of the beauty of God. For holy men and women,the gifts and love of friends were not just this human token of friendship and love but the expression of God's love and friendship too. Surely St. Paul was saying something of this when he wrote to the Colossians (3: 17): "Whatever you do, in word or in work do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him". And Jesus was reminding us of this when He told us to love God above all things with our whole minds and our whole hearts,and with all of our strength. To see God in all things,in all persons and in all events and to love God there is the secret of great holiness. It seems more difficult for people these days to see God in their lives this way. It used to be we knew God's love for us in the harvest, in the sunshine, and in the rain, in health and in sickness, both because of our immediate experience of depending upon God , and consequentially in our prayers. People in the centuries before us were far less independent than we are today. When someone got sick or infection set in there was no knowledge of penicillin or other such medicines to help the cure. People would naturally turn to God. Before the days of artificial insemination and commercial fertilizers electricity and machines, the farmer knew full well his dependence on nature and on God. Now we know so much and can do so much about nature and its processes that if something goes wrong or we have some need we tend to go to science, to a machine, or to our fellowman for help and advice rather than to God. We are in danger,then, of forming habits of forgetting that nothing exists or is possible without God, that the light of the moon always comes from the sun. It is not at all that faithful people today are called to live back some hundred and fifty years in history and cast aside the improvements and advances modern science has made possible for us. Not at all! Rather we should make an effort to realize, as always, nothing exists without God. If today we have so much and such a wonderful world, we are called upon for greater thanksgiving and response to God's presence and God's eternal love.