Monday of the 1st
week of Lent
March 10, 2014 8:30am
Two years ago, one American made
these statements in a speech.
“There is nobody in this country
who got rich on his own.
Nobody.
You built a factory out
there? Good for you.
But you moved your goods to
market on the road the rest of us paid for;
you hired workers the rest of us
paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and
fire departments that the rest of us paid for.
You build a factory and it turned
into something terrific?
God bless.
Keep a big chunk of it.
But part of the underlying social
contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes
along.”
The point of my quoting this has
nothing to do with economic or political philosophy.
Instead, the point is that we are
not as self-reliant as we think.
We are not as independent as we
imagine.
We depend on the wisdom of
others, the charity of others, the contribution of others to the common good.
In the parable of the sheep and
goats today, Jesus challenges us to realize our connectedness to one another
and in some way to all persons – as sons and daughters of the Father and as
brothers and sisters in Christ.
He calls us to be aware of that
connectedness and to live out of it.
He especially calls us to realize
that we are connected with those in need and that when we care for them, we
care for him – for Jesus himself.
With this reading here in the
first full week of Lent, the message seems to be that our Lenten practices, like
fasting and prayer, are to be aimed to living out positively our connectedness
with others.
In fact, our doing this may be
the ultimate test of the value and effectiveness of any special practices we
undertake in Lent.
