A NOTE FROM FR. VINCE
Hello everybody!
Remember when we thought that the months crawled by. What happened? Now they are flying by! Let’s hope people don’t start saying that the summer is half over when the 4
th
of July weekend is ended. Polk and Dallas Counties are still having a scary number of cases…..but people say that our death numbers are ever decreasing. That’s because we are getting used to it. How dangerous is that? When the death number is 4-6 a day, that’s 120 by August 1. Then it sounds worse, and most of the cases are close to our zip codes. Enough bad harping!
For me, the 4
th
of July weekend is one of my favorites. We celebrate the longest-lasting democracy which is the United States. In case you missed it, our country is a mess. You probably know on WORD, that you can bring up synonyms. So I checked on something more suitable than the word
‘mess’
. It brought up
‘chaos’
. Chaos is actually a good choice though. The derivation hints that the word
‘chaos’
does not connote something bad. It’s actually more neutral. It’s what you do with chaos that makes all the difference. Good chaos can feel scary, but it may lead to something powerful. I think good chaos can lead to
meaning
. Does the chaos of the pandemic have some possible good outcomes along with the obvious crisis? Maybe the meaning comes through closer family ties, or the meaning can come through discovering what is important in your life. Does the chaos of racial unrest have possible good outcome along with the obvious crisis? Maybe the meaning comes through seeing our neighbor in a new light, or the meaning can make us more colorblind.
There is an article on the CNN website about what the race of Jesus was. The news to me is that the color coding of race is only several hundred years old; not thousands of years old. Most people never got vary far from their own home or clan in ancient times. It didn’t always mean that we were automatically afraid of people looking different from ourselves. The scourge of slavery was the force that said we were white or black. Seriously? Most ‘white people’ are actually beige. Most ‘black people’ are actually brown. Most ‘American Indians’ aren’t red; only their war paint apparently. In the nearly 8 billion people on the planet Earth there are 8 billion distinctive tints of color. Why do we see only 5? Lest we forget, God apparently likes
‘color’
! Every time a human being is born, there’s a new shade. In the U.S., there are 328 million shades of color. God Bless America! Happy 4
th
!
