The Real Humanists

Traveling always confronts me with the desperate state of the human condition. Pumping gas in New Mexico, shopping a Super Wal-Mart in Arkansas, or just driving down the 40, the vast need for the Gospel is inescapable. There is a famine in the land.

It seems to me that, in our culture, some of the prime causes of this sickness are the twin demons of materialism and evolutionary thinking. Society has made a sorry bargain: denying the spirituality of the individual, they work to distance themselves from God. How long can you be told that you are simply an advanced monkey before you begin to believe it? Such thinking may exempt you from morals, yes, but it also exempts you from the passion and dignity you have as a spiritual being.

I search people's eyes, looking for some sensitivity, some animation, some sapience - that spiritual spark that has rightly related itself to the sparrows. It is frightening to be confronted with the echoing emptiness of a soul denied wings, or, for that matter, denied existence. Spirituality is not bondage, it is liberation. Shame on the Church for showing the world otherwise for so many centuries.

We must remind people that they have a soul; indeed, they are made in the image of God. As it says in Job, "There is a spirit in man," or in Psalms, "You are Gods." To love your neighbor means, in part, to help him "recognize" himself as a moral, dynamic, spiritual identity.

Sometimes it makes me wonder who the real humanists are.