The Machine Stops

I was waiting for the elevator (lift) one morning and when it arrived and I stepped inside it said ‘sorry for keeping you waiting’. I have come to doubt her sincerity..

It put me in mind of a short story I read years ago, written in the early 1900’s by E.M Forester called ‘The Machine stops’. Science fiction in its day but having re-read it, it sent a chill down my spine as I recognized so much of my own daily life in its pages.

It describes a world fully connected by ‘the machine’. People living in subterranean condominiums, communicate through a screen, take courses, talk instantly with anyone around the world, push a button to get food or other necessities, never go outside or have real human contact and simply recycle the same ideas over and over at the expense of original thought. It sounds familiar.

In the US it was reported that young-teens are checking their social networking sites (Facebook and twitter particularly) with smart phones up to 100 times per day. I got on a bus the other day and every occupant was glued to their smartphones, I could have walked in with a rocket launcher over my shoulder without being spotted, even the driver was checking his phone while another line of smart-phone zombies filed in behind me.

What we receive through these devices is often inaccurate or low quality information and yet people have a tendency to trust what they see on Facebook, it can be quite hard to discern fact from fiction. Pictures with mis-quotes are all the rage, quickly followed by a cat video and then a high resolution photo of somebody’s egg and chips; a stream of inaccuracy, bland entertainment and trivia. It’s a sort of junk food for the mind and we are feasting on it to the exclusion of a more nutritious diet.

 It’s worth assessing how much time we are using up (the supply is limited) with these devices as compared with say spending time with loved ones, time in prayer, in something socially useful or going off-line altogether and enjoying nature perhaps.

Our reliance (and addiction) to these very new technologies is already disturbing. We will need to be intentional and deliberate in disconnecting from them frequently in order to use them rather than be controlled by them. 

Vengeance or Forgiveness ?

An inmate at a jail in the Bronx had an interesting insight, distilled from his life experiences:- “When someone wrongs us, we want the maximum amount of punishment. But when we do wrong, we want the maximum amount of understanding and forgiveness.” As a teenager he was robbed of his paper round earnings of $27 by 3 older boys. He got a knife, found them and stabbed all three and this began his own criminal life.  His response or reaction to the evil inflicted on him took him down that same road.

A former inmate from Manila city jail that I met recently had a different story. He was framed by an acquaintance for a multiple murder, a forced confession under torture was obtained by Police officers eager for promotion and he was sentenced to death by electric chair. (This was during the Marcos era when the death sentence was still used). He spent the next 6 years on death row, mostly in solitary. During that time, through the Prison ministry and a life in the Spirit seminar, he had a conversion and was able to forgive the people who had contributed to his woes. He accepted all as coming from the hand of God, whilst still pleading for his life to the new president. Soon after, his appeal was referred to the Supreme Court and he was found not-guilty and released. Since then he travels between jails to reach out to inmates, telling his story and bringing them what little relief he can, grateful to God and compassionate to his brother inmates, whose sufferings he understands all too well.

How we respond to the evil we encounter in life has a profound effect on the result.

For the Lenten season this year I was inspired to pray for the people who had caused pain and suffering in my life, I decided to have Masses offered for the more malevolent and malicious among them. And as I prayed during these first weeks of lent, I found many names and faces from the past come up who still had some capacity to affect me as I relived the incidents and then prayed for them. For example I thought of a sadistic school teacher, a false friend, an overcritical work colleague, a bully during my school days. The worse they were, the more I pitied them. Forgiveness is a must as we need it too, from those we have wronged and of course from God. 

The healer

When we are told ,  “…in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Phil 4:6) we know it makes sense, perhaps by faith or experience and yet can become forgetful and rely instead on our own understanding, perhaps it’s part of our terminal independent streak

.

A few months ago I woke up with a sore thumb. The knuckle was stiff and it was painful to move. Either google or Facebook led me to believe that it might be arthritis or gout and I should drink plenty of water. It didn’t work. So I took the unusual step of visiting the doctor, who prescribed some pills. They didn’t work either. After many months it dawned on me that I had not really mentioned it in my prayers so my wife got a bottle of blessed oil and prayed over my thumb for healing.

At this point I would have been quite satisfied with a common or garden complete miraculous healing of the pain and symptoms.

After the prayer it was still sore. So I figured I would have to carry this cross a little further and we went out for a walk. Or perhaps I should say we were led by the Spirit, because the Lord had a much more spectacular healing in mind.

To escape the searing heat of summer we soon ducked into an air conditioned shopping centre and strolling through its endless corridors walked up to a Pizza restaurant I had never been in. We usually avoid all fast-foods but before you could say cholesterol, we were locked in to its tractor beam and found ourselves seated in front of two freshly baked pizzas. It was, without exaggeration, the most delicious pizza I have ever tasted, heavenly. But the full significance of this event was not revealed until the next morning.

When I awoke and tried to wiggle my fossilized thumb, it was pain free, no longer stiff, with a full range of movement again. The Divine Physician had written out his prescription “take 2 pizzas and call me in the morning” which of course I did; to thank Him. The pain never returned.

It was a really funny answer to prayer but when you think about it, whilst doctors have a certain generalized knowledge of how the body works and its various malfunctions; only God has the big picture and He knew what vitamin or mineral or other ingredient was missing from my system that a pizza could replenish. How much more then can He provide solutions to all our needs if we entrust them to Him in prayer.

Unlikely Evangelists

Evangelism by the laity is a recurring topic that always left me feeling a bit clueless as to what a practical application of it might look like. In one sense I was quite impressed by the way protestant churches approached this. They trained their congregations, had programs, strategies, were quite creative and yet what emerged was often cloned evangelists with stock rhetoric, there was something missing.

I discovered what it was when I worked for a chemical company years ago in the tea room on one of the plants I visited. One of the managers, who also had his tea break there, was very antagonistic towards God and the church and like many atheists and God-haters would deliver his anti-God sermons almost every day. It was clear that a conversation would be pointless so I prayed for him instead, sometimes out of pity, and other times out of annoyance. Month after month!

I was not the only player in the piece of theatre that was about to unfold though. The next was ‘the tobacco man’ who used to tour the plant selling pouches of tobacco smuggled in from Europe on the Lorries. His role was that he had a full forearm tattoo of the crucifixion scene. Each time he came in, the atheist winced as his eyes were inexplicably drawn to the cross.

One afternoon God fielded a ringer, the head chef of the canteen. A man with a volcanic temperament, made worse by a punitive financial settlement following a recent divorce which occupied his every waking moment. As the atheist began his daily rant against God I could sense that the chef was in no mood for it and without even delaying to put his teeth back in he declared “You ungrateful bastard; He died for your sins’

Whether or not there was silence in heaven, I don’t know; but there was in the tearoom. The atheist was glued to the spot, head bent over and visibly shaken. The chef put his teeth in and thought about his ex-wife. The tobacco man took a long drag on his roll-up and lowered his tattooed arm into position on his knee and the atheist looked into the image of his savior’s eyes without wincing this time.The gospel had been preached to him in its fullness, his own soul’s condition revealed to him like a violent lightning bolt, the sword of the Spirit had found its mark and his life would never be the same again.

God is always looking, always preparing, assembling teams of evangelists, creating a space to do His work and completing the task, often with people who are not religious at all, untrained, and even totally  unaware. He is the prime mover in evangelism.

Fierce, but without power

I have noticed lately that in movies there is an increasing fascination with the supernatural and of the eternal  battle between good and evil with a multitude of special effects to add to the drama and portray the horror of the evil one. It’s usually depicted as being a close run thing though, as if there is something close to equality between the two sides, but nothing could be further from the truth.

I had a peculiar illustration of this recently following the long awaited opening of our parish’s adoration chapel. I try to visit most days and from that first day, each time I went, I was set upon by a vicious stray dog that came hurtling across the park snarling and barking stopping just short of the range of my umbrella.

This may sound trivial but it was every day, sometimes accompanied by a few other dogs that surrounded me as I approached the chapel. As days turned to weeks I was getting quite weary of this daily ritual, I even prayed for Moriarty (that’s the dog’s name).

During this time I was also reading a book about the life of St Anthony, the Egyptian hermit, and this was very insightful as being attacked by the devil in various guises, from packs of dogs, to serpents and insects was his bus ride to work. However he soon discovered one important fact …they had no power. The devil even had to ask permission from God before he could do anything as in the trials of Job. In reality he was very much afraid of Anthony.

So one morning, approaching the chapel from a different road, I caught Moriarty unawares as he sat in the alley. He immediately recognized me and started barking and snarling but I just walked towards him and he started to run, turning occasionally to growl, but in retreat and I realized that it was all a ruse, that really he was afraid of me.

As the darkness of our world seems to be ever increasing it’s worth noting that compared to God, the devil and his fallen angels are mere creatures, already a defeated enemy. The only way they have any power over us is if we give it to them, yielding to them usually through sin or fear. But as praying Christians, in a state of grace, we have nothing to fear, quite the contrary, we are conquerors and can apply Christ’s victory with every moment or subject of prayer, ushering in the Kingdom of God and dispelling the darkness of evil.

Holy Russia

In 1977, as a schoolboy, I had the opportunity to visit the Soviet Union. I had little appreciation of faith in those days but did attempt to attend Mass on Sunday. Arriving at the one church that was still open we met with the news, from a few grandmothers, that there would be no Mass as the priest was ill. Sixty years after the revolution the youngest priest must have been in his mid-eighties. The lights must have almost gone out on the church in Russia in those days.

And yet perhaps it was from amongst those grandmothers (orthodox and catholic) that the countries future return to faith lay. Both Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin were secretly baptized as infants, a spirit lying dormant for many years as they grew up atheists & part of the communist party machine.

Now Putin seems to be the standard bearer for a new Russia that, astonishingly but correctly, pointed out how Godless America and the west had become whereas Russia upholds the traditional family and teaches the Christian faith in state schools, a freedom now curtailed in the USA. The high ground has shifted so perhaps it’s fitting that the Russians are the ones to lead in the fight against ISIS in Syria. 

At the beginning of the air strikes, on TV, I noticed a Russian MIG pilot entering his jet with an icon in his hand, showing an understanding of what alliance he and his comrades needed for this particular fight. 

Whilst Putin may never be the poster boy for tactful foreign policy, in this instance he is the only leader with the backbone to tackle ISIS which is certainly the world’s priority at present. 

Defining a just war in our days is difficult but perhaps defining the adversary leads to the conclusion. I searched for an apt description of ISIS on Wikipedia and these extracts look close:-‘no ability to feel pity, compassion, or remorse’... ‘soon came to view themselves as the supreme race and began a conquest of domination and extermination’. ..’having had every emotion removed except hate’

Actually the definitions above are found under the heading ‘Daleks’; same psychological profile and modus operandi as ISIS though.

What is Hell like ? (from St Faustina's diary)

Today, I was led by an Angel to the chasms of hell. It is a place of great torture; how awesomely large and extensive it is! The kinds of tortures I saw: the first torture that constitutes hell is the loss of God; the second is perpetual remorse of conscience; the third is that one‟s condition will never change; the fourth is the fire that will penetrate the soul without destroying it – a terrible suffering, since it is purely spiritual fire, lit by God‟s anger; the fifth torture is continual darkness and a terrible suffocating smell, and despite the darkness, the devils and the souls of the damned see each other and all the evil, both of others and their own; the sixth torture is the constant company of Satan; the seventh torture is horrible despair, hatred of God, vile words, curses and blasphemies. These are the tortures suffered by all the damned together, but that is not the end of the sufferings. There are special tortures destined for particular souls. These are the torments of the senses. Each soul undergoes terrible and indescribable sufferings, related to the manner in which it has sinned. There are caverns and pits of torture where one form of agony differs from another. I would have died at the very sight of these tortures if the omnipotence of God had not supported me. Let the sinner know that he will be tortured throughout all eternity, in those senses which he made use of to sin. I am writing this at the command of God, so that no soul may find an excuse by saying there is no hell, or that nobody has ever been there, and so no one can say what it is like.


I, Sister Faustina, by the order of God, have visited the abysses of hell so that I might tell souls about it and testify to its existence. I cannot speak about it now; but I have received a command from God to leave it in writing. The devils were full of hatred for me, but they had to obey me at the command of God. What I have written is but a pale shadow of the things I saw. But I noticed one thing: that most of the souls there are those who disbelieved that there is a hell. When I came to, I could hardly recover from the fright. How terribly souls suffer there! Consequently, I pray even more fervently for the conversion of sinners. I incessantly plead God‟s mercy upon them. O my Jesus, I would rather be in agony until the end of the world, amidst the greatest sufferings, than offend You by the least sin.