Thought for the Week, July 27, 2025

 

Continued from last week.

The diversity of peoples in the universe, of nations and races, colours and culture, bear eloquent testimony to a fact: God, the Divine Artist, enhances the beauty of the world by willing this diversity.  Wars show that human beings are woefully incapable of appreciating art.  That is why they have so much to worry about.  Failing to appreciate the beauty of diversity, human beings manage to convince themselves that they can create a universe more beautiful than the one God has created.  And they think the way to do it is to eliminate diversity.  In this project of out-Goding God—if one may be permitted this neologism—God no longer counts.  But when God is denied, the human being created in his image and likeness is denied.  Surely, there is a lot to worry about.  Man’s denial of God and man, that is what gives man so much to worry about. 

Our numerous preoccupations make of each of us a restless spirit.  Applicable to us are the words which Jesus spoke to Martha in the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to Luke (Last Sunday).  While the Divine Guest was visiting Martha and her sister Mary, Martha played a dutiful hostess, concerned with all the tiny little details of hospitality to the point of having no time for the intended recipient of the hospitality.  “You are anxious and upset about many things,” said Jesus to Martha, “one thing only is required.”  Every person got to figure out what this thing is.   

In the midst of the confusion human beings often experience, in the very heart of the existential turbulence,   the Christian Gospel offers tranquility and direction in those words of Jesus. What Jesus said to Martha is not different from what he would say today to all who have so much to do, so many things to attend to, and need to get our priority right. All other things may be important.  But we must not lose sight of the only thing that matters.  It is that thing that we must put first.   

On further reflection, it turns out that this thing is a person.  It is God himself.  Not only is God to be loved, God is to be loved above all things.  God is that one thing that matters.  Jesus did not rebuke Martha for paying attention to the duties and details of hospitality.  He was only saying to her: all the things you do are important.  But if you do not get your priority right, even those things you are doing well come to nothing.  Priority must be given to the Lord of the work over the work of the Lord.  Good work is inspired by good listening. 

Our activities are sterile when they are not rooted in our relationship with God, sterile in the sense that we cannot find fulfillment by engaging in them.  It is when we put God first that we put his word first.  We must not put his world before his word.  And it is when we put his word first that we are inspired to do his work.  In our hierarchy of values, being with the Lord must come before working for the Lord.  Putting God first is about making time for the Lord of time all the time. 

We need to be brought back into ourselves, into what St Catherine of Siena calls at the beginning of her Dialogue “the cell of self-knowledge”, and the long journey into ourselves is a journey into God, or, if we are not far from God, a journey that leads  us to renew and deepen our relationship with God.  Having created us in his image and likeness, God has made us in such a way that if, from time to time, we stop and ponder the eloquence of silence, we shall not only be in tune with our inmost self, we shall be in tune with the God who speaks in silence.  And to be in tune with God is to come to the awareness that God must be first in all that we do.   There are three sets of questions here: first, what does it mean to put God first?  Secondly, why put God first? And, thirdly, how is God to be put first?  

Let it be said for now that putting God first means a lot more than the usual exercises of piety. It is not merely a matter of practicing a religion.  Indeed, there is no human being without a religion.  The unholy trinity of power, pleasure and possessions inspires a cult of success understood as maximization of power, pleasure and profit.  To worship in the cult of success, as many do in our time, is to live in the constant and crushing fear of failure.  Yet the problem human beings face is neither success nor failure but how to manage them.  It is our mismanagement of, and or our failure to manage, either success or failure that combine to drive us crazy.  In the midst of our innumerable preoccupations, and in the midst of our desire for success and fear of failure, the temptation to marginalize God is irresistible. But to put God first is to bring God back into the picture of our lives, not to be at its background but at its foreground, the very centre of the picture.  It is to seek the tranquility of order by entering into communion with the one who put order in the primeval chaos that we read about in the Book of Genesis when “the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the abyss” (Gen 1:2). 

On October 11, 2012, the fifth day of the 13th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops with the theme: “New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith”, Pope Benedict XVI led the Church into the Year of Faith.  It was a fitting way to mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.  It was also a fitting way to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  The Council was convoked and the Catechism written to transmit the Gospel.  And the Gospel is teaching us to put God first.  Putting God first is the recognition and application of the wisdom in the words Jesus spoke to Martha.  “Only one thing is necessary,” said Jesus to Martha.  And that thing is the love of God above all things.  And in those words can be found a reaffirmation of the Shema Israel. To be continued.