Finding God in a Changing World

Jesus said, “All that you see here — the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.” One of the things that seems to be a constant in the world is that things are and will continue to change.  The world is changing, the church in the United States is certainly changing and our lives are continually evolving.  A lot of times changes are good - like when we change jobs to find something that is more fulfilling and challenging.  However, we all have a number of days in our lives when things change and it wasn’t what we wanted.  The world that we knew and liked and wanted to continue is not that way anymore - in other words, the temples of our lives have fallen.  We all have had these days - some of us I’m sure are having them now - the days when a loved one died, or you lost a job or someone confronted you with something about yourself that you would rather not have admitted was true or the day when you realized something you really wanted to do in life was probably not going to happen.  We all build these temples and we think they are going to last forever or we think they are the stability and the structure that will meaning to our lives until all of a sudden they’re gone and they do not provide what we needed from them anymore.    In the Gospels, people are asking Jesus about the Temple in Jerusalem - the structure that was the center of community life for the Jewish people in Jesus’ time.  If you go to Jerusalem today, you’ll note that that Temple is long gone - with the exception of part of one wall of it.  So, the question in our Gospel really is what ought we to do on the day our Temple falls?  Some people are going to become angry and cynical and give up.  I know that I have certainly been tempted to do that.  Their problem is that they can not see anything left or they are looking for ways to continue the old structures even though those kinds of things are inevitably going to end up as just short term fixes.  Other people want to blame someone else - lets find the group that thinks or believes differently than us and we’ll blame them for our quote unquote problems.  None of this is Jesus’ response.  The challenge that Jesus is calling is to is to find where God is right now in our lives - not where we were or where we want to be but right now with whats in front of us.  This can seem enormously difficult at times - for me when I have trouble finding God in my life, I like to turn to a book by Fr. Walter Ciszek - He Leadeth Me - about just this question and his struggle and ultimately successful journey in finding God during his twenty three year long exile in the Soviet Union.  If we can’t find God in the present - even when our temple has just fallen - then we won’t be able to find God anywhere.  The world is charged with grandeur of God as Gerard Manley Hopkins tells us and he doesn’t say that that only applies to when things are going well.  Ultimately, if we run away, or blame somebody else or try to put the old temple back together again then that means the story really is over.  But, Jesus is always doing something new and the story is never over.  Have perseverance, trust in the slow work of God and then you will see the temple being rebuilt until you realize that you are the ones who are temple and you don’t need these other things.  As Jesus said, by your perseverance you will preserve your life