September 11, 2005

The terrible events of four years ago on September 11 are brought to mind this year on a Sunday. I became Pastor of this parish at that time when the future of eve­ry­thing seemed fragile. Since then we have known war, the unprecedented world disaster of a tsunami, and now our own nation’s worst national disaster on the south­ern coast. The response of our people in each instance has been profound. At the same time, we have seen the evapora­tion of the superficial piety which allowed many spiritual dilettantes in our culture to indulge forms of bourgeois self-worship and to question the True Faith.

In surprising ways, mettle and maturity are growing in these days. Pope Benedict XVI is reminding timid souls of the beauty of Catholicism, even as sects and gurus scur­­­ry away from the real spiritual battle and fade away in the corners of civilization.

Each of us is accountable to our Lord who makes the sun to rise on the good and bad and the rain to fall on the just and unjust (Matt. 5:45). Prayer can change ourselves and everything else. Jesus promises that anything we ask “in my name,” as he put it, will be bound on earth and in heaven. That does not mean anything we want, but anything he wants that we put to work in our lives. The phrase “in my name” in Aramaic, “b’shamy,” means, roughly, “through my power as the center.” In Christ “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). True prayer attaches the self to Christ who makes reality coherent. There are disasters natural (hurricanes and floods) and moral (mayhem and murder) because the Fall of Man affects everything, inanimate as well as human. Even the sky grew black when our Lord was crucified. “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subject to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom. 8:18-21).

As quantum physics shows the ways that objects move and affect each other by complicated relations between waves and particles, so in the spiritual realm do our prayers and actions affect time and eternity. This is our power to bind and loose on earth and in heaven. A single parish is a wave and particle of this supernatural economy. This busy summer, the schedule was little different from the rest of the year, but as we complete this fiftieth anniversary year, our prayers centered on Christ’s cosmic power in this Eucharist Year can accomplish much.

Fr. George W. Rutler