RBWords - Volume 21 - Number 6: June 2008
Something to Think About
Like so many folks at the present time, I anxiously watch those big movable numbers at the gas stations. I do this wherever I\'m traveling, even if I\'m not driving! How can a substance like oil become so incredibly important to life? We know that the high price of a gallon of gasoline can make us think twice about even going to the grocery store! And the higher prices of food items are, in part, due to the higher cost of transporting and packaging food items because fuel and packaging both come from petroleum! Airline tickets become more expensive as well. When people travel less, all those businesses that rely on travel suffer. When gasoline costs more, people buy smaller vehicles or put off buying a new pickup truck, which in turn impacts the folks who work on assembly lines at the auto plants. (The Ford plant in Louisville is a good example for us here in Central Kentucky.)
Various explanations are given for the high price. One of them may come as a revelation to Americans: large countries like India and China are becoming as modernized as our country is, and their demand for gasoline has become competitive with ours! This competition attracts speculators who bid for oil futures and this drives up the cost of a barrel of oil! And, of course, constituents write to their Representatives and Senators in Washington, DC, which generates a great deal of unhelpful rhetoric about bringing down the price of oil by supplying ourselves from considerably smaller reserves in Alaska and the offshore regions. Indeed, would we even be engaged in the terrible war in Iraq if it weren\'t for the oil there?
Before the advent of the internal combustion engine (oil) or the steam engine (coal), similar concerns about salt supplies led to armed conflict over the control of that substance! Out west in our country, concern about the Colorado River water rights has created tremendous tension about the future of the very attractive lifestyles of those desert/mountain areas. Oil, coal, salt, water – all of these natural substances have such tremendous impacts on our lives. We are beginning to realize that our planet is finite and that we Americans do not have a prior right to many of these things that make our lifestyles possible. God has given us the obligation of stewardship and responsibility, but we have often turned instead to consumerism with no thought for tomorrow. Now, “tomorrow” appears everyday in a big number at the gas station. IT\'S SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT.
It Has Been Said
The Christian view does not make an abstract division between matter and spirit. It plunges into existential depths of the concrete union of body and soul which makes up the human person, and by clearing the spiritual temple of all those way of thinking which obstruct our inward vision, opens the way to an existential communion at the same time with ourselves and with God in the actual, subsisting, spiritual reality of our own inviolable being. In this way, the body is not discarded (which is in any case not possible) but elevated and spiritualized. Man is not cut in half, he is drawn together and finds himself more of one piece, more integrated than ever before.
From THE NEW MAN by Thomas Merton