There are many things in all our lives that need scrutiny. Society and secularism creep into our very being without us even knowing. So, what follows is not an indictment of all Christians, but merely a warning.
The eclipse was last Monday, and we all survived! The sky did not fall, gravity stayed constant, and nobody I know looked straight into the sun even during full eclipse. What did happen is a lot of talk about how wonderful and mysterious mother nature is. What a marvel that the moon just happened to be of the right size to blot out the sun.
Now I get it, it was just idle conversation, and goodness knows if I went around correcting all that I meet during casual conversation, nobody would talk to me, and rightly so! But I do get that tug of the Holy Spirit when such things are said, and especially when I say something similar. Society has trained us well.
Mother nature is the lady in control of the environment; some of us remember the margarine commercial that told us that it is not nice to fool mother nature. All fun and games, right?
A company that had a bar of chemicals that wanted to pass it on as real butter, but I was not fooled. They even convinced us that it was healthier than butter, and my parents banned butter from the house. A simple ad changed our lives, but it laid the foundation that there is some lady that has control of all nature.
So, when a natural event comes, we all wonder what this mostly-unknown woman is going to do to our lives. I mean is she in a good mood? Maybe she is tired of us littering up her planet and she has an idea of punishing us? I don’t know about you, but I have an uneasy feeling putting my life in the hands of some elderly unknown matriarch that had a hard time identifying real butter from a tub of laboratory goo.
Fear has the ability, as with all sin, to mask our eyes from what is true. That is why when one of the deadly sins (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, or pride) presents itself, we typically answer it with an incorrect action. They mask us from God. When we feel fear, we panic; when we feel slothful, we stop; when we are lustful, we act on that feeling. Sins put us in a fog that we find difficult to navigate out of.
So, what do we do? How can we defeat this seemingly unnavigable fog? We call on God. When my car fogs up on a cold humid morning, I don’t hesitate: I turn on the defrost, and all the fog on my windshield goes away. When we find ourselves in fear or any of the seven deadly sins, we should commit to prayer, immediately.
But what if you thought God was distant, and that he had left a lesser god in charge, say a woman in long flowing dress that called herself mother nature? Well, we can’t pray to her! I am enough of a Christian to know that! But we are confused, as society has for years told us everything and everyone else oversaw creation, anyone other than God. It is insidious!
They have slowly crept all these ideas into our psyche with commercials, newscasts, and music, just to name a few of their favorite vehicles of destruction. Surprisingly it does not take much to get our focus off God, the true God, and to insert a bit of chaotic fear. It just takes a small tear in the screen door to let an army of mosquitoes in the house, and it just takes one believable lie to get our eyes off Christ.
So, this is not time to burn books and smash TVs, but it is time to post the guard of prayer and scripture at the door of our minds. Nothing gets in without being put through God’s filter. That way we can be in creation but not of creation.
Be careful what you allow to take residence in your mind, and more importantly be careful when you feel fear or any of the other sins take hold of you. Pray, read scripture, and believe that God is in control, and He especially loves you. He would never leave you in the questionable care of some middle-aged woman that claims control over our planet. He has our time in His hands, let Him worry about what His creation is doing.
Fr Scott Wooten was born and raised in north Texas. He spent time as an Episcopal pastor before converting to the Catholic faith and subsequently was ordained a Catholic priest. He holds degrees in architecture and a Master of Divinity. He is assigned Parochial Administrator of St John Vianney Catholic Church in Cleburne, which resides in the diocese of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter.
