Monday of the Thirty-Second Week in Ordinary Time

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/110711.cfm

Gigantic waves fade away
as they ripple to the shore

Love justice, you who judge the earth;
think of the Lord in goodness,
and seek him in integrity of heart;


Yesterday I reflected on Wisdom, that queenly attribute of God which the Spirit pours into the hearts of believers. The scriptures today invite us to meditate on Justice. 

Ordinary human wisdom believes that justice and mercy are opposed to one another. A just judge is a hanging judge; a merciful judge is soft-hearted. 

Inspired by the Holy Spirit, the Hebrews never saw it that way:

...steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;  righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. Psalm 85:10-11

This scriptural understanding of justice (righteousness) and mercy (peace, shalom) was born of the Jewish experience of oppression. The prophets announced and the people experienced their God as One who prefers the poor, disadvantaged, alienated, despised and abandoned against the powerful, entitled, comfortable and secure. They understood how the powerful inevitably (and even unconsciously) fix their scales for cheating. (Amos 8:5)


For the past three years, with the onset of "The Great Recession" we are discovering how our international economic system has been rigged to favor the powerful. Suddenly mid-century international inequities arrived in the United States with "Reagonomics," and fell upon the American middle class. 


For a few days last week the world trembled as the Greek populace was offered the choice of restoring the system to some kind of balance. Realizing they would inevitably vote their pocketbooks rather than what the powerful hoped might be the universal good, the offer was withdrawn. We will never know what the Greeks might have chosen but we're starting to realize the catastrophe of uncertainty will persist for years. There are no easy solutions and no one can imagine even a complex set of solutions. 


Yesterday, I noted how Saint Francis has been mis-remembered as the foolish saint, one who followed his owned impulses as he smelled the flowers and danced with honeybees. Were we to turn to his actual teaching today, we would learn to "pray always," continually seeking the Will of God in matters great and small. It is true he was a man of impulse, but his impulses were always followed after he had prayed arduously, begging God for guidance and the rending, wrenching spirit of obedience. 
More than once he was keenly disappointed in following his own ideas, and even as he followed the well-trodden paths of holiness. I point especially to his disappointing trip to Egypt, when he was not martyred. (In the 13th century everyone knew the saints were martyred. There was no other way.) Though much good came of that trip, including a momentary conversation with Islam and a recognition of Muslim piety, he discovered God's true path for him, the path of the painful stigmata, only after his return to Italy. 


How the Lord might lead us out of this Great Recession no one can imagine; but were we as citizens and voters to beg for God's guiding Spirit of Justice and Mercy, we might see the next step in that direction, even without a clear perception of its consequences. If that happens:

 Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
   and righteousness will look down from the sky. Psalm 85:10-11