Monday Musings - Have We Become Too Complacent?

It is so easy to deceive and delude ourselves into thinking that we have been progressing in our spiritual lives. Thank God, someone like Father  Donald Haggerty comes along and forces us to open our eyes and take a closer look:

(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)

"If Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord and God, gave Himself to the death described in the Gospels, how is it that a disquiet does not register somewhere in the peaceful soul of someone who kneels head bowed before a crucifix after receiving Holy Communion at a Saturday evening vigil Mass and follows his act of piety in the next hour by an expensive meal, while a diseased child in sub-Sahara Africa sleeps restlessly in the long hours of this same night after finding nothing on a plate at dinner but the dust of a windswept desert?...

It may be that there is a direct correlation between the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the presence of the poor in any age. When the poor are ignored, when little thought of their sufferings intrudes into other lives, the crucifixion itself as the central event in history is obscured. Callousness toward the one is an indifference to the other."

(Father Donald Haggerty from Conversion: Spiritual Insights Into an Essential Encounter with God)