25 June 2020
Thursday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
Watching the construction of a building, particularly one that will be very tall, it seems that the workers spend most of the time preparing the foundation. And of course, anyone who works in construction will tell you that this is the most important part of the building, even though you don’t see the foundation after the building is completed. Today’s gospel, which uses the example of a man building a house on rock, provides a good summary of Jesuit spirituality. The First Principle and Foundation, the “bedrock” of the Spiritual Exercises, notes with clarity and precision that the successful bedrock of our lives is a focus on God. This clarity of focus became very blurred in the 19th century and has continued until the present when a non-spiritual option for the human condition became a viable option. No longer challenged by the idea that right and wrong were prior to human laws established by God, the advocates of materialism saw the greatest convenience in establishing the idea that there was no God and that humanity was free to shape laws as they saw fit. Building a society on the loose sands of relativism bore, and continues to bear, no end of problems with racism and the devaluation of the human person fostered by eugenics as just two of the noxious weeds in the bouquet of materialism. Today’s gospel calls our attention to our fundamental values established by God. If there is a fundamental disrespect for the dignity of the human person—a respect ordered by the divine plan and known by reason– then it is no surprise that this disrespect finds manifestations within various aspects of society. The firm foundation identified by our faith, and by reason encouraged by faith, have, throughout the centuries, identified that every single human life matters.