14 Jun Friday

The second reading this Sunday is all about relationship. After all this is the purpose of the human person we are made for relationship, finally for a relationship with God. Many people today are confused about this, thinking that our purpose is our work. We were not made for our work, which is not our careers, and even before given care for the garden of this earth, by God. The relationship came first and is the last.

I’m remembering a quote from Winston Churchill, “A living is what you get, but a life is what you give.” It’s the famous John F. Kennedy question, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Both examples of the fine art of rhetoric.

As the Psalm has it, we are given “rule” over the earth, or in Genesis the awful translation of “dominion” is used, all the while the language points toward being in an orderly relationship with the “garden”, this earth.

The Trinity is a relationship of love. All this is problematic for the American male, rugged individualistic, self-made, whose model is Natty Bumpo of James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstockinng Tales, as in the Last of the Mohicans, and later the Lone Ranger. these images, besides being unattainable myths, are contrary to the true end of the person — a relationship of love in the Trinity.