(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Mass-Blog-for-the-13th-Sunday-of-Ordinary-Time-2024.mp3)
The most common mode of transportation to Hell on Earth is renouncing our faith, and its most common drivers are scientists. One former Christian in that profession described his most recent trip:
“I’m saddened by my loss of belief in religion. It’s like leaving forever the comfort of your childhood home. But I believe we all have to grow up—to see the world as it really is and not in terms of magic.”
The tragedy of such anti-belief is that it seeks fellow travelers. Scientists who lose faith enjoy writing books about their loss. Sometimes their books get lots of buzz—like this guy’s did recently in the Review Section of The Wall Street Journal. It seems the shakier their case, the longer their book’s title. This scientist’s book is called: “Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness is and How to Expand It.”
People of faith tend to expand their faith without using chemicals, unlike this man of science. His goal was to feel a near-death experience without crossing the border into it. He likened his trip to Ego-death, writing:
“I learned that the experience of self is optional. … Transformative experiences … are living proof that nervous tissue, under special circumstances, can host extraordinary experiences.”
But he acknowledges,
“People who have undergone religious, mystical, aesthetic or near-death experiences are marked by them.”
This scientist rationalizes his inability to be so marked. He seems almost jealous of those who live by faith, unlike those who, like him, are dying to find it. His chemical trip to death’s border took nine minutes, but he needed an hour to return to the “self” he calls his ego. Might his inability to find the way to God have bruised his ego?
He failed because death is not of God. The Book of Wisdom tells us as much this Sunday, and it seems to discourage the use of man-made chemicals to find our Creator:
God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. For he fashioned all things that they might have being; and the creatures of the world are wholesome, and there is not a destructive drug among them nor any domain of the netherworld on earth, for justice is undying. For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him. But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who belong to his company experience it. (Wis 1:13-15; 2:23-24)
Our faith-deprived scientist has not only surrendered to death, but embraces it. In a YouTube video, he says:
“I’m a highly organized pattern of math and energy. In an objective accounting of the universe, I’m practically nothing. And soon I’ll cease to be. That certainty makes life more meaningful.”
So, this self-professed nothing wants us to buy his book so we can experience nothingness too? Sunday’s gospel reading from Mark (MK 5:25-34) offers an alternative role model in a woman who abandoned the suffering men of science imposed on her and found new life through faith:
[She was] afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. … She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak. … Immediately her flow of blood dried up. … Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who has touched my clothes?” … She fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you.”
This woman’s experience freed her to prophesize about faith in a life beyond ego. Jesus introduced her to the Superego of God, just as God introduced himself to Moses in Exodus 3:14, instructing him to tell the world that I AM sent him.
That marked the start of a faith that has survived millennia on earth. And as our faith-deprived author might one day realize, even people without faith have an innate feeling that they share an immortal spiritual link to a God whose first name is “I Am.” This scientist put that name in his book’s title, after all. Now all he has to do is discover God’s last name: “Love.”
–Tom Andel
As the line in the movie “The Usual Suspects” goes, “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
Some scientists and many ignorant people just can’t come to terms with things they can’t see, comprehend or test. They disregard the reality that the God who made everything out of nothing works in mysterious ways–beyond our comprehension.
Many highly “intelligent” people consistently disregard that their mental capacity is a direct gift from the God who created them. These people are easily duped by the forces of darkness.
Now that is ignorance in action!
Many intelligent people confuse mental capacity with wisdom and ignore the true wisdom that reveals God through faith.