You Are The Light of The World

When I was young, my best friend and his family went camping in the wilds of southern Illinois at a place called "Lincoln Trails State Park."  Now, if you are going to rough it for a week, this is the place to do it in.  Each space had an electric hook up, there were honest to goodness flush toilets and immaculately clean showers.  Couple this with a beautiful fishing lake and you had a little bit of paradise on earth if you are into camping that is.  We had a good time that week.

What I remember the most is the night I walked down to the dock.  I am a city boy and when I looked up into the sky and had my first look at the Milky Way, I just knew that God had something to do with this.  The sky was black velvet and there were a billion stars in view.  I looked at that and realized just how small and insignificant I truly was. I knew from science class that the light of some of those stars had taken thousands of years to reach my eyes.  There was a great majesty in the sky above me and it took my breath away.  God is the great builder of things and of souls.  If the Milky Way is so impressive, what must the soul of a saint be like? 

We are called in the Gospel for today to be reflections of Our Father's love. We are called to shine like stars and even brighter than that!  Our brightness, fueled by our love of God, will attract others to Our Father because of the beauty our souls receives as grace from Him.  

A city on a hill cannot be hidden.  During the day the sun points out its location and at night the lights of its streets and byways show exactly where it is.  The Catholic Church, through each of us, must be that city on the hill. If we treat others with the love that God is treating us, then people will be irresistibly drawn to God and that built in desire to be one with God, which they have buried deeply in their soul, will blaze forth and they too will add to the light of the City of God.  

Star Stuff and the Round-About at Bernards Star...

This week I have been watching some YouTube videos dealing with space and the incredible data that has been collected by the Hubble Telescope. What I have heard and observed this week has convinced me that we do not always see things in the reality that they reside in without the help of a powerful lens. Take for example our picture today. It shows part of the sky as seen by the Hubble Telescope.  The brightest points are all within our galaxy, the Milky Way. They are the objects in this photo that are closest to us and the word close is a tiny bit on the inaccurate side because the light from these stars may have begun the journey to our eyes hundreds of years ago.  What we see in this photograph is not what any of the stars or galaxies look like today, no, using the Hubble lens, we are seeing what they looked like hundreds, thousands, or even billions of years ago.  The scientists can peer further and further back into the past almost to the point where they can see the hand of God putting a match to the fuse on the concentrated ball of matter that was the center of the Big Bang.  As strange as it seems, scientists are more and more becoming more and more convinced about how intelligently the universe has been designed.  The calculations made by these scientists show that if the Big Bang had lasted a nanosecond more, or if there was just a little bit more or less matter at the time of the explosion, the universe would not have formed.  The odds of all of these random factors lining up just perfectly are, excuse the pun, astronomical! 

 Our home, the Milky Way Galaxy contains about four hundred billion stars.  You and I live, love, and die on a blue marble near our sun which is about twenty-seven thousand light years from the galactic core. We are in the Orion arm of the galaxy.  As impressive as that may be, our illustration to the left shows dozens upon dozens of galaxies of all sizes out there.  All of them at distances that make making a visit to them quite impossible for us to contemplate.  While all this is breathtaking, it makes us "bags of mostly water" as a creature on Star Trek once called humans feel a bit puny and quite non-essential to the bigger picture. The Big Bang was instituted by God with YOU in mind.  His calculations from the very beginning included you in them.  Every calculation was perfect and over the eons, our earth was formed, life began, and soon man walked the earth, subduing it and mastering it as God tells us to do in Genesis. When the time was right, you were conceived in the furnace of passion and in about nine months you began your sojourn through space and time. 

God went through a lot of trouble to create you.  Everything had to be in place for you to arrive and He saw to it. In Genesis, when God was finished with all of the work he was doing, he looked it over and saw that it was "very good." What we forget is that God, who lives outside of space and time, saw each of us, and he pronounced us as "very good" too.  This is an important concept because it validates the life of every person who ever lived as being from God and destined to return to God. So, on those days, and all of us have them when the boss is cranky, the baby is crying, the bill collectors are calling, take the time to remind yourself how very important and precious you are to God.  He made only one of you and there will be no Mark II model, you are it. You have been created out of star stuff and placed in this universe to do a job that no one else can do.  For heaven's sake, do it!