LISTENING TO JESUS IN TODAY’S SOCIETY
Even until a few years ago it was religion that offered most people the criteria to interpret life and the principles to direct it meaningfully and responsibly. Today on the other hand, there are all too many who dispense with God to face their life, desires, fears and goals alone.
It’s not an easy task. It’s probably never been so hard and problematic for an individual to think, reflect, and make decisions about oneself and about what’s important in one’s life. We go about submerged in a «culture of insignificance» that ties people to the «here and now», making them live alone in the immediate, without any openness to the ultimate mystery of life. We move about in a «culture of entertainment» that tears people out of themselves and makes them go about forgetting the great questions that they carry in their heart.
The person of our day has learned many things, is informed about what’s happening in the world around us, but doesn’t know the path to know oneself and construct our liberty. Many would subscribe to the dark description that was made by the director of La Croix, G. Hourdin, a few years ago: «The person is making himself incapable of loving, of being free, of judging for himself, of changing his way of life. He’s becoming the robot that is disciplined to work and earn money, who then enjoys a collective vacation. He reads the latest magazines, watches the TV programs that everyone else watches. He learns thus what he is, what he loves and how he ought to think and live».
We need more than ever to pay attention to the Gospel call: «This is my Son, the beloved, my chosen one. Listen to him». We need to stop in our tracks, be quiet, savor life at its roots, not waste it just any old way, not pass over superficially what’s essential. Listening to God incarnate in Jesus, we discover our littleness and poverty, but also our greatness as beings loved infinitely by God.
Each one of us is free to go about listening to God or turning our back to God. But in either case, there’s something all of us need to remember, though it strikes us as scandalous and countercultural: to live without ultimate meaning is to live «senselessly»; to act without listening to our inner voice of conscience is to be «unconscious».
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
