Crises have spiritual roots

To be blunt about it, the trouble stems from some serious spiritual malady that’s now showing itself in many and multiplying forms. There’s greed, vanity and pride, insincerity and deception, etc., that make up the lifeblood of the vicious cycle of consumerism, materialism and hedonism.

People are spending more than they earn, they are averse to saving and are hooked to imprudent if not impulse buying, not anymore of consumables, but of much heavier items like houses and other pieces of real estate.

Banks just want to create money even if the portfolios are based more on air than on substance. They have been rediscounting financial instruments under incredibly questionable conditions. So what do you expect? Cracks will soon appear, and collapse becomes imminent.

They are throwing caution and restraint to the winds, deep-sixing due study and planning, while giving instant, almost mindless responses to what can amount to caprices. They have grown complacent, have reached the limits of safety and are falling into a kind of mass madness.

A cartoonist captured the whole situation with a caption that the US economy is running on stupidity. That may be a stretch—it’s a caricature, of course—but it conveys a lot of truth about the turmoil.

The underlying spiritual and moral anomaly has broken away from the confines of the personal and even class dimensions. It has spread like cancer, its ground zero first affecting people’s character, then their mentality and their culture.

This particular crisis has gone beyond Wall Street and is now affecting Main Street in the US . Let’s hope the bailout rescue plan works and contains its spread. The prospects are horrifying, in spite of huge efforts to soften their impact.

This is not the time to talk only of economics. We have to talk about spiritual values and virtues, of faith and morals, in a more serious way. No use staying in the denial stage. We have to explode the myth that talking religion and spiritual warfare is not politically correct in this case.

The Christian concept of poverty has to be more systematically drilled into everyone. Its aspect of responsible stewardship, its requirements of social justice and solidarity, transparency and accountability have to be appreciated better.

It seems that the American landscape is increasingly allergic to these concepts. That is the problem and the daunting challenge that has to be faced. There’s a certain dulling of conscience of a growing portion of the population that needs urgent and drastic conversion.

This disturbing development is writ large in the current electoral campaign where issues go beyond the purely economic and political, and have gone deep into the field of faith and morals.

It’s amazing how those who are against Christian faith and morals in the US appear to be growing. They are less of a minority now, and are not anymore in the fringes. They seem to be more and more into the mainstream.

Those for abortion and who are openly atheistic and agnostic are getting more strident in their views. For example, they fault the candidate Sarah Palin for praying, for not aborting her handicapped baby, for allowing her unwed teen-aged daughter to have her baby instead of aborting him.

For sure, there’s a lot of good elements still in that great country, but I’m afraid a lot of things are changing in a frightening way. Analysts may describe the parties as conservative and liberal, centrist or left-leaning. I feel that at bottom, the divide is created in the deeper recesses of people’s faith and consciences.

The US financial crisis now is just but a tip of the monstrous iceberg now drifting dangerously in the American waters and in that of the world. We need to do something about it.

PRAYER

Prayer is said to be our personal encounter with God. Through prayer, God, our Creator and Father becomes present to us, close to us, eager to listen and speak as our most intimate friend. But God is more than a friend. He is the almighty, so powerful and great, so that we do not come to Him all our secrets, even those we would never dare say to a friend and bringing Him a long list of what we want and need.
Because our Father is so great, and we, for all our nearness to Him, so weak, nothing in fact, our soul opens up to Him and bows before Him in adoration. But because at the same time we are aware that He is our loving Father, that adoration is inextricably linked with love, filial confidence, joyful gratitude and praise. Realization of our complete dependence on God, and of His infinite fatherly goodness towards us, makes us naturally turn to Him for all the needs of body and soul, confident that He will not fail us. Knowledge of our infidelities and acts of ingratitude fills us with humble sorrow, and the firm resolve to correspond more generously to His goodness.
These four aspects of prayer life-adoration, thanksgiving, petition, reparation - are also known as the four ends of prayer. Scripture is full of examples of these prayers. A true Christian cannot but pray, for his relationship to God is not an impersonal or artificial thing that touches His life only remotely. Precisely because God is his Father, he must pray, he must have towards Him that continual Christ has commanded it, and thought us how to pray, by the Father anything in my name. Ask and you shall receive..." (John 16:24). And often in the Gospel we see Christ retiring into the desert to pray, sometimes spending whole nights and days in colloquy with His Father, such as when He made the forty days' fast before the start of His reason for prayer is its vital role in our spiritual life; without it we cannot be saved, for the graces we need can be ours only through prayer, " Ask and you shall receive" (Matt. 7:7).
Our prayer, in order to be truly Christian, must have certain essential characteristics. Prayer is speaking to God with respect and love in order to adore and praise Him, to thank Him, to obtain pardon for our sins, and to ask for His favors and blessings for ourselves and for others. In prayer we also listen to God who reveals to us what He wants and expects from us