“The Kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Lo, here it is!’ or, ‘Lo, there it is!’ For behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:20)
The media journalists enjoy reporting various “appearances” of the sacred ones by Christians of good will who claim to find images of the Mother of God in a potato chip, on the reflection from the wall of a glass building, Jesus Christ in the knot of a tree, or some other odd location. The reporters declare the alleged sighting without comment, either not wanting to hurt the feelings of the sighters, or else assuming that such sightings are evidence that there remain the gullible and easily fooled, even in these enlightened times.
It may be more than those partial explanations. As our loving Lord makes clear in the Holy Scriptures, each human being is created with something deep inside of us that is divine. We may choose to act like the animals in the universe, but we cannot always deny that yearning for a completion that only communion with the Creator will assuage. As the blessed St. Augustine declared in a short prayer: “My heart is restless until it rests in Thee!”
Everybody knows the phenomenon of those wanderers lost in the desert, parched tongues dried, the whole body wracked with the lack of water. They fantasize that they are able to see lakes off in the distance, and then they set out slogging through the sand to get to that oasis, only to discover it was a mirage. On a much simpler level, we are advised not to shop in the supermarkets long prior to a meal, or we will fill up our carts with foodstuffs that we wouldn’t ordinarily buy.
Now we are citizens in a civilization that claims to have put God behind them. There is no longer any place for prayer in our schools, no day reserved exclusively for worship and family gatherings, no time set aside in our lives to pray, to read the Bible and to meditate on the God above us and within us. They don’t fast any longer. They diet. They don’t look at one another across the supper table; they stare at the television set. The people who influence how we think and what we should consider important or irrelevant emphasize humanist and constantly changing values at the expense of what is divine and eternal. There is no place in our world to exercise souls, or even to acknowledge the soul’s claim on one’s whole being.
What can we do about it? Surely we must do more than complain and justify our higher spiritual standards. We ought to align ourselves with all people who affirm and yearn for an end to humanism as the basic philosophy of our society, be they other Christian communions, Jews or Moslems. We have in common our recognition of God in the souls of all human beings. We can look for Christ in the faces of all people who share our time and space. We can do our utmost to build up the Body of Christ in our church, affirming all that is good, right, true and sacred in our sisters and brothers in Christ. We can and ought to begin with ourselves. One soul we can influence is our own. One place we know that we can discover the hidden Kingdom of God is within ourselves.
As you “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” (Philippians 2:12) as St. Paul recommends, you will polish the image of God within you, and thereby become a living witness of God in the world. If you care to change our world from humanism to godliness, the best way to do so is to change all within yourself that is not yet perfectly in communion with the loving Lord.