Reflection
You will rescue my life from the pit, O Lord?
-Jonah 2:2
Ever feel you are in a pit? Some days I do.
On those days the world seems in unending turmoil. A litany of evils in the news day after day can overwhelm my ability to navigate living.
I ask, “Has goodness hidden? Is God paying attention?”
In my psychotherapy practice, I have noticed a dramatic shift in recent years. Clients spend much of their sessions wringing their hands in frustration at the events swirling around them. Wars, economic instability, mass shootings, shouting matches in the committee rooms of Congress, climate calamities, vengeance, lying, greed, poverty and illnesses.
Each upsetting issue takes a toll. Taken together, with time, a sense of powerlessness and despair settles into the soul that destroys hope, inner peace, and joy.
We feel like we are in a pit of evil with no exit.
In the Gospel selection for today, a man who robbers “stripped and beat and went off leaving him half dead” was also in a suffering pit of sorts. He was lying on the busy road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Alone. Suffering. Bleeding. Half-conscious. It was a pit of despair.
Would he survive? Where was God? Why did God let this evil happen?
Two holy men of God, a priest and a Levite, men who worked in the Temple and were supposed to be extra close to God, walked past the struggling victim.
Then the unexpected happened. An outcast, someone never allowed in the Temple, someone segregated from Jews, someone a Jew would never speak to, stopped to tend to the broken human moaning for help.
God did not reach from heaven to miraculously lift the man from his pit of agony. No. But God did work as God always does: He touched deep inside a Samaritan’s heart to do the work of God, to provide healing.
Yes, our world right now is terribly broken. We witness it is bleeding, half-conscious, near death.
We have nowhere to turn because it seems there is no rescue us from ourselves. So, we cry out to God as Jonah did, “Will you rescue my life from the pit, O Lord?”
Where is God right now? Doesn’t God see we are near death? Doesn’t God care?
Our faith tells us God does care. That God loves us more than any human can imagine. But where is that love?
The answer is much simpler than our constricted imaginations allow.
The answer is to look around. Who do you see? Open your eyes to the wonder of one another. Reach out and connect with someone who is hurting. With a stranger. With the frightened and alone people in your parish, in your neighborhood, at the store, on the littered street corner. Join with others to resist the harsh treatment of refugees and immigrants, to protect Mother Earth, and to fight racism, war, and poverty. God is present when we open our eyes wide enough to see the divine in one another and to bow down before this God. When we touch one another in love, support one another in our loneliness, risk connecting to someone who frightens us, and forgive each other in mercy, there is God’s healing presence.
Thus did the Good Samaritan. “Go and do likewise.”
