Simply vital

The Roman Catholic Lectionary today presents texts which bring us to think about the death caused by sin. The passage from the Book of the prophet Ezekiel enumerates many offenses against God and describes the lifestyle of the righteous person. The maintenance of a list of the sins and commendable actions in life is a difficult and probably insufficient technique to assess the state of our relationship with God. The promise to Ezekiel is that God will infuse people with a new heart and a new spirit. Friar JudeWinkler describes this as an intellect attuned to the will of God and a new vitality which comes from avoiding the death caused by sin. The choice, sometimes often during the day, to follow our own path to attend to our selfishness, pride, privilege, power and need to be appreciated are deaths which mean we have missed the vitality of continuing to live simply in the way motivated by our love of God. The Gospel of Matthew uses Jesus attention to the attitude of the children to emphasize to us that the complicated, sophisticated way we rationalize and justify our attitudes, choices and actions needs to be reviewed. The vitality which is deeply desired by the psalmist today is the fruit of repentance and return to the relationship as children of God.