23 August 2020
Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
To the Wonder is a 2012 American theological romantic drama film written and directed by Terrence Malick. In this movie, Malick provides audience with a visual schema of exitus et reditus (the exit and return) of St. Thomas Aquinas, by beginning and ending the movie around a singular scene at Mont Saint‐Michel (nicknamed, La Merveille, “The Wonder”). For Aquinas, God is love and He is the sources of all love. God brings all creation into being through love and sustains it. Ultimately, creation returns and finds its home in love, who is God.
St. Paul concludes his praise of God and God’s mysterious ways in his letter to the Romans with the schema exitus reditus, that all things are from God, through God and to God. This passage contains the exalted character of God as the source of all things. Moreover, it also contains statements about God’s mysterious plan. From this passage, Paul wanted to express his struggle to understand the certain paradoxical salvation of Israel as dependent on the salvation of the Gentiles. In the end, he understood that in God’s mysterious plan, both Israel’s failures and its future of salvation are intertwined with the salvation of the Gentiles. Thus, God’s mysterious action for salvation far exceeds human comprehension.
Many of us might struggle to understand the situation in the world these days. The coronavirus pandemic does not seem to be coming to an end. Can we be certain that God works all things for the good and all things are from God and through God and for God?