Those 'Why?' Questions

Holy Saturday

The Domestic Church

Last night Joseph, my 18-year-old son, husband Rob, and I, watched Romero.   It was a Good Friday movie night.  It’s easy to feel weighted down by the questions of evil and why a good and gracious and powerful God allows such massive evil and suffering. It seems to me this morning that the tales of human courage and solidarity offer another why.  Why are people capable of such profound identification with their neighbor?  Can we have it both ways...both free to love and magically rescued?

Why the Incarnation?

Why the Cross?

Why the Resurrection?

Why did it take all of these to ‘save us?’

Today, to ask questions is part of my testimony of faith.  Doesn't it seem like answers are always ‘in the making?’  Like science, theology builds upon the reflection of so many over such a long time. And yet there is the constant that offers the context for the questions in the first instance. The wise and the mystical continue to ponder and what satisfied at one time can appear insufficient in another.  We are novices.

Romero, the movie, offers a few nibbles around these great mysteries.  For me…today…they are enough. 

The Incarnation…because a God who is love must be tangible and bodily; a sacrament of the image and likeness that allows for loving one’s neighbor to take on flesh.

The Cross…because ‘putting it all on God’ had to end.  Violence is our way to restore peace, not God’s.  At the crucifixion it failed.  There was no parade.  We have been facing that ever since.  We still think violence can beget peace.  Not so.

The Resurrection…now we experience presence.  God is present when we gather not in his own fleshy body but in our corporate body and in the meal we share...a Eucharistic presence.  This very path is our hope for today and our promise for tomorrow. 

Archbishop, now Saint, Oscar Romero:

“Nothing is so important to the church as human life, as the human person, above all, the person of the poor and the oppressed, who beside being human beings, are also divine beings, since Jesus said that whatever is done to them he takes as done to him. That bloodshed, those deaths, are beyond all politics. They touch the very heart of God.” 

“It has become my job to tend all the wounds produced by the persecution of the Church – to record all the abuses and pick up the bodies.”

“As a Christian I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be reborn in the Salvadoran people”