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The Presentation
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The more unusual an event happens to be, the easier it is to believe that God was involved.
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For example: a man has surgery, and it reveals cancer,
but it is a small tumor and is easy to remove. After some chemotherapy,
the man is well enough to return to work and all is well.
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But the opposite is true of another man. The cancer
is far advanced, nothing can be done. And the doctors predict no more
than six months. The six months come and go, and the man continues to
live. He goes back to the doctor and there is no evidence of the tumor
that threatened his life. No one can explain it, and everyone says it is
a miracle.
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Both events turned out exactly the same.
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We call one a miracle, the other simply human
achievement; why the distinction? I think the difference lies at the
point of familiarity.
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We are getting used to the idea that, with early
detection and treatment, people do recover from cancer, but spontaneous
recovery is another matter. It is very rare and we have no explanation
for it. Therefore it must be an "Act of God." That is our tendency. We
see God in the unusual, but not in the ordinary.
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Our gospel introduces us to a man who somehow has
overcome this tendency, his name is Simeon. He was in the temple when
Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to present Him to God. The scene that
struck his eye that day was an ordinary couple with an ordinary looking
baby. And what they were doing was an ordinary event in that culture.
For hundreds of years Jewish parents had been practicing this ritual.
But Simeon looked at this ordinary scene with the ordinary couple and
their ordinary baby, and saw the Divine, saw the Messiah. He knew that,
in this child, heaven touched earth, and life would never be the same
again.
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The problem we have today is that if we see God only in the unusual, we rarely see Him. But if we train our eyes to see Him in the common things, we will meet Him every day.
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Most of our lives are ordinary. We usually do the same
thing day in and day out. We get up at the same time, get the children
off to school, and go to work. We do not have the time to get all
spiritual when we are having difficulty putting one foot in front of the
other. We are just doing our everyday chores.
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But do we ever think of God when we eat? Without Him
nothing would grow. Do we ever thank God for putting those we love in
our lives?
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No one ever saw God more clearly or more often than
Jesus. It is worth noting where those sightings took place: He saw God
at work in wild flowers and birds, lilies of the field and birds of the
air. He saw the saving work of God in a shepherd searching for lost
sheep. He saw the grace of God in a father embracing a prodigal son. He
saw the kingdom of God in the trusting faces of little children.
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For Jesus, ordinary events and ordinary people were open
windows to heaven He could look through and see God. You and I can do
the same.
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Our failure to see God does not mean that He is absent.
More than likely it means that we are looking for Him only in the
unusual, and the unusual rarely happens. But God is with us all the
time, in the ordinary people and those ordinary events of our ordinary
lives.
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How do I know this? Why else would He take simple bread
and wine and say... "This is My body, this is My blood, given for you...
do this in memory of Me."
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Yours in Christ,
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Fr. Robert Warren, S.A.
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