We miss how our lives impact others

The texts today from the Roman Catholic Lectionary offer us a starting point to consider how our lives impact other people. The despair felt by Tobit and Sarah in the passage from the Hebrew Testament is accompanied by the misconception that our presence is not important or may even be disasterous for others. This can be a view which is ironically quite self centred as we place our despair at the centre of relationship with God and others. Steve Scholer comments on the effect of a habit of prayer on the battle against this troublesome state of mind. The Sadducees, who did not accept the idea of any life after death, query Jesus with an improbable scenario which involves the application of Jewish customs to ensure an heir to those who die. The response of Jesus resonates with the representation of Jesus as a philosopher which we have seen in Church art during our visit to Italy. The sights, sounds, smells, tastes and emotional response which we experience are links to our continous relationship with the Divine which we can call prayer. This lifeline to the Transcendent is a active ingredient in the cure we often need for having a self centered vision of our life. The attempt to process all of life through the discipline of our intellect is as restricting to us as it was to the ability of the Sadducees to see the meaning in the texts to which Jesus refers in the Gospel today. The grace of being open to the big picture was demonstrated yesterday in two events from our trip. We visited the Roman Church which is the burial place of St Ignatius of Loyola where we found the place which honours this founder of the Society of Jesus which is sometimes assumed to be overly intellectual in their expressions of faith, to be very much in the tradition of the Roman Catholic churches we have visited which immerse us in the full emotional and traditional presentation of the story of the development of faith. The end of the day took us to the centre of ancient Rome atop a rebublican monument build to mark the unification of Italy. The obvious political intention to portray the new regime as heir to the power and glory of the ancient empire has created a excellent viewing platform for all of Rome. The location and size of this structure modified the view of the ancient Churches by the citizens who gather in the plaza of the people. One of the ironies of this city of contrasts is that the visibility of Churches and their contents is a great source of revenue for Romans and the government of Italy despite politcal action to attempt to make them less visible to the people.