For those who like to reminisce on bygone Hollywood films, let me call to mind one that still occasionally raises social controversy. The year was 1967 and the film was “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” starring Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katherine Hepburn and Katherine Houghton. The plot concerns the Draytons, a wealthy, white, Catholic, California family who pride themselves in being “sixties liberals.”
In this prolific age of the spoken and written word we are literally and constantly being shouted at, abraded, challenged, disputed and queried. Particularly, during this season of political discontent, for instance, so many seem to be lunging at one another’s throats to establish a particular unassailable opinion or position. Human discourse today seems to have a raw edge to it.
Love is a serious word, it carries many emotional meanings but fundamentally it conveys the sense that we would be willing to give up all else, not for this thing but for this person or persons, these people who have cast their lot with us and are willing to travel the world’s paths with us until death. Love then is serious business.
stones have been an integral part of planetary existence since Neolithic times, the late stone age, when Stone fragments were used as household grinding implements, weapons of attack, articles of defense or punishment. In short, for millennia stones have served, whether for good or ill, as a means of survival or instruments of vengeance.
In these most recent times we recall violent events in such places as Baltimore, Ferguson, death in an Oregon classroom, death of a black teenager on a Chicago street, death at an abortion facility in Colorado Springs and, last but not least, the killing of fourteen innocent Christmas celebrants in San Bernardino, California. Perhaps T.S. Eliot had come upon some deep mystery when he said that we keep coming back to our beginnings, hoping that we will discover some meaning in the events that face us, as though for the first time.
But recently at mid-morning someone told me that a young gunman at Umqua College in Roseberg, Oregon, killed 10 students. It is so utterly tragic. And yet, an ounce of sense would have reminded me that bad news never ceases. If it were not bad it wouldn’t qualify for breaking news. Walter Cronkite made that clear years ago when he would end his evening news broadcast with the words: “That’s the way it is, folks.”
Speaking of the church at large, the Pew Research Center found some years ago that there is a movement among the younger generation toward simplicity. They insist that they are spiritual but not religious and are inspired by simplicity.
In short, my friends, the word is wisdom, a word from the wise that will save us from ourselves. Unfortunately, at this point in history, there seem not to be sufficient wise-minded people who can help us live at peace with one another, at least for the long haul.
So, what did Jesus really look like, what kind of person was he? This question still surfaces occasionally in the Q/A columns of a few Catholic periodicals. People in the Middle East, of course would simply say, “Well, he probably looked like any one of us; he had Arab-like features; such basic characteristics do not change appreciably over the centuries. Issue closed.
I have come to believe that bread, in whatever, shape, taste or form you may encounter it, is pure evidence of God’s transcendent care for the people of this hungry planet.