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September 2007 Issue
Goodness
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Does
it seem to you that more and more people seem to be
living at a kind of constant simmer? A chance throw-away
remark can cause an eruption. A forgotten turn signal
can bring someone behind you to a boil of road rage.
For a moment, the basic belief in the ordinary goodness
of people seems gone forever.
It doesn't help that so many of us are
on a constant media diet highlighting the evil in humanity
today. If it's not the surprise axe-murderer down the
block, it's the embezzler in the town offi ce or insurgents
blowing up innocent by-standers as well as themselves.
So much evil in the world all around us can sink our
hearts into feeling that the whole world and we human
beings are fundamentally evil. |
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But that's not what our biblically based
faith tells us. Yes, in the Bible we can get our fi ll of
the vain, destructive and perverse ways of human beings. The
Bible doesn't hold back in revealing that side of us. Even
God from time to time is pictured as fed up with the very
creation for which the Lord of all was responsible for bringing
into being. But God relents and God remembers. Man and woman
were created to be the very image of God. And God saw and
pronounced all creation as very good.
It's that sheer goodness that God put into
us that is at the heart of who we are. Jesus liberated and
restored God's goodness in us, loving us when all we demonstrated
was our own evil. He brought a new creation into being by
his loving death and resurrection. We should be able to notice
how that liberated and restored goodness shines in people
all around us. When ordinary people get the chance to talk
about the goodness of their families, friends and neighbors,
we can't help but notice how good people really are. How generous
and self-sacrifi cing, how heroic in bearing their own burdens
and even the burdens of others. This goodness shines in people
of any and every age. We should celebrate it.
Msgr. Gaspar F. Ancona is recently retired.
He is the author of Where the Star Came to Rest, a history
of the Diocese of Grand Rapids.
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