RBWords

  

     I have been reading some American Dominican history and have just finished a section dealing with American Dominican missionaries in China.  Some of them were captured during the communist revolution in the late 40's and the story of the trials and tortures that they endured are difficult to read.  Of course, there are many such stories about missionaries, especially in the period after the Second World War, that we read during my grade school days at the height of the "cold war."  All of them have one very important component.  These missionaries were sustained by their faith.  Their adversaries could destroy their bodies but not their souls. 

 

     There have been times in my pastoral experience when I could wish that more of our faithful could read these stories, not to be horrified, but to see the lesson of endurance.  When faith is trumped by social or athletic convenience, one wonders what the true value of faith is to someone.  While there are some drawbacks to the model of the human person as a composite of body and soul, it is clear that "body" is triumphing over "soul" in our culture all too often.  Jesus' admonition becomes some kind of quaint biblical thing that seems "irrelevant."  I begin to wonder if we haven't created a "Gehenna" in our own time which is destroying both body and soul.  When faith becomes "inconvenient," what choices do we make?  AMEN