Wax or hard mud?
WAX OR HARD MUD?
Mario D’Couto
We just celebrated the feast of the
Epiphany a few days ago. As I reflect on this, what strikes me as about this is
two contrasting positions (read on to find out). If you have read my blogpost/article,
“Christmas – A time to reflect”, this is just to reiterate what was mentioned
before.
When our Blessed Lord was born,
Herod, driven by insecurity, sought the Lord not to pay homage and honour but
to kill Him. Why? Because he felt threatened that he would lose his position
whereas the three wise kings, to who this feast is attributed, sought the Lord
to honour Him (Matthew 2: 1 – 12). What is our approach? How is our relationship
with God? I remember when I used to teach in Sunday school, I used to tell the
children that unless they felt the need for God, as Someone they cannot do
without on a daily basis, no matter whatever the practices of piety may be
there, it won’t help because that’s what animates and enlivens our relationship.
If that is not there, we are probably just going through the motions without realizing
why we are doing what we are doing. 
God Almighty invites us to a
personal communion with Him. Do we become insecure and feel uncomfortable with the
thought that if we come closer to God, we may have to give up certain
things, in fact, it so happens that more often than not a lot of atheists do
not want to believe in an all powerful God or some may not like to do anything
with God because doing so would challenge their lives, demanding them to put
effort to live more uprightly, or do we welcome Him with open arms knowing that
following His precepts would free us to do more good rather than bind us?
Here are the words of Bishop Fulton
Sheen who, when writing about the Presentation of Our Blessed Lord in his book,
“Life of Christ”, had this to say,
“’The
Divine Disturber’ would provoke human hearts either to good or evil. Once confronted
by Him, they must subscribe to light or darkness. Before everyone else they can
be ‘broadminded’, but His Presence reveals their hearts to be either fertile
ground or hard rock. He cannot come to hearts without clarifying them and dividing
them, once in His Presence, a heart discovers both its own thoughts about goodness
and its own thoughts about God.
This could never be so if He were just
a humanitarian teacher. Simeon knew this well and he told our Lord’s Mother
that Her Son must suffer because His life would be so much opposed to the complacent
maxims by which most people govern their lives. He would act on one soul in one
way and on another, in another way, just as the sun shines on wax and softens
it and shines on mud and hardens it. There is no difference in the sun, only in
the objects on which it shines. As the Light of the World, He would be a joy to
the good and the lovers of light but He would be a probing searchlight to those
who were evil and preferred to live in darkness. The seed is the same, but the soil
is different and each soil will be judged by the way it reacts to the seed. The
will of Christ to save is limited by the free reaction of each soul either to
accept or reject.”
Dr. Scott Hahn in his book, “Reasons
to believe”, tells of one of his experiences with a student of his who was
an agnostic/atheist. It so happened that this student once asked him, “I
think that if God did not exist, we’d invent Him anyway. And we did. What do you
say to that?” to which Dr. Hahn gave a fitting reply, “You know what I say,
John? I say, if God did not exist, we’d invent atheism anyway. And we did. John,
I don’t know what you’re like but I know what I’m like. And I know what God is
like – at least the God I say I believe in. That God, is infinite and He is all good too and all righteous and perfectly holy. And He commands me to be
perfectly holy too. Since He’s all wise, He knows exactly when I’m not holy
or good and He judges me based on what He knows. Oh, and He’s immutable, too,
so He’ll never change. He’ll always be the way He is now; so He always holds the
same standards and He’s always going to judge me by every idle word I utter.”
He (Dr. Hahn) went on to say, “I have
to admit, John that, that kind of God threatens my present state of existence
and my lifestyle. If I were going to invent a god, I’d probably make one, more congenial
to my whims. And if I didn’t have the sense to invent him that way in the first
place, I’d at least invent a god who could change his mind.”
From the above encounter between Dr.
Hahn and his student, it gives us an insight into the mind of an atheist and the
agnostic which for them, God is nothing but a fairy – tale or a substitute in
order to make up for the incompleteness or the void in human life. The pioneer
of his trend of thinking goes back to a philosopher name Ludwig Feuerbach, who
later went on to influence Fredrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a novelist and a
contemporary of Ludwig Feuerbach once made a statement, “If God did not exist
then everything is permitted.” This in other words tell us that atheism and
agnosticism is not so much an intellectual problem but a problem of the will. Despite
the various sources found in order to prove God’s existence, some people just
cannot bear the fact that God is real and that is precisely because they want to
live on their own terms, not according to God’s will.
In Romans 1:18, St. Paul recounts
how so many people trod along the downward spiral of sin. In his view,
immorality and unbelief are co – dependent dispositions. People must ignore or
deny God if they want to do things that are objectively wrong. And as these actions
become habitual, so does their ignorance or denial of God.
A person may or may not be a hardcore
atheist and the reason I say this is because although one may claim to be a believer
and not an atheist, it’s the attitude that also makes a difference. It’s one
thing to know God but act like it did not matter while it is another thing to
fall down but get back up and strive to make right what one has done wrong.
To conclude, as St. Thomas Aquinas said, “To one
who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no
explanation is possible”, I leave you with this question to reflect, “Are
you a ‘wax’ or ‘hard mud’?” 
