
DIOCESE OF ST. PETERSBURG | 2022
Consider this: there is a famous billboard that hangs along a congested highway. People stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, going 5 miles an hour, look up and read “You aren’t stuck in traffic. You are traffic!” That’s a great insight! We distance ourselves from a problem, whether it is our politics, our churches, the ecological problems on our planet, or most anything else. We are not, as we want to think, stuck in a bad political climate wherein we can no longer talk to each other and live respectfully with each other. Rather we ourselves have become so rigid, arrogant, and sure of ourselves that we can no longer respect those who think differently than we do. We are a bad political climate and not just stuck in one. We are not separate from the events that make up the world news each day. Rather, what we see written large in the world news each night so often reflects what’s going on hidden inside of us. When we see instances of injustice, bigotry, racism, greed, violence, murder and war on our newscasts we rightly feel moral indignation. It’s healthy to feel that way, but it’s not healthy to naively think that it’s only others and not us, who are the problem. When we are honest we have to admit that to some degree we are complicite in all these things, perhaps not in their crasser forms, but in subtler, though very real, ways. The fear and paranoia that are at the root of so much conflict in our world are not foreign to us. We too find it hard to accept those who are different from us. We too cling to privilege and do most everything we can to secure and protect our comfort.