fathersullivan.com

Sunday, 6/9/13

In our first reading Elijah brought back to life the only son of the widow of Zarephath. In the Gospel Jesus brought back to life the only son of the widow of Naim. But as fine as those miracles were, those two boys would have aged, and fallen victim to deadly ailments.

In the Second Grade I raised my hand, asking Sister Anne Vincenta why all the miracles were back then rather than now. She told me we have miracles today. She said every saint the pope canonizes has brought about three miracles.

Thinking about such miracles now, I see that each one of them marked an occasion when God suspended the laws of nature to do mankind a favor. But I have come to feel that the Church should more highly treasure the scientific discoveries which, instead of suspending the laws of nature, actually revealed God’s hidden plans for the miracles of Nature.

Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would lead us to all truth. Doesn’t that mean that he has led Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Watson, and Crick to revealing God’s hidden plans for operating the universe. St. Paul in Ephesians thanked God for the privilege of being the one to reveal God’s hidden plan for summing up all of us in Christ. In revealing God's hidden natural plans were not those scientists similarly privileged?

I often repeat words spoken by Beatrice in the Divine Comedy. Dante, arrived in Heaven, and seeing so much that was strangely familiar to him, asked Beatrice about it, and she answered, “All things among themselves possess an order; and this order is the form that makes the universe like God.”  

While Mathematics is such a problem for most of us, for those geniuses Mathematics was God’s language. It was the language God used in establishing the hidden order of all of Nature’s processes.

Einstein, in an attempt to analyze some natural process, had filled several pages with his mathematical equations, then he tore them up, saying, “No, that is too complicated. God would not have done it that way.” 

It was Einstein’s calculations that permitted our astronauts to circle the moon. Only Jews and Christians who were convinced that God’s laws govern the whole universe, would have dared to pass around the moon’s dark side.

Scientists tell us there are three billion DNA molecules in every human body. Each DNA molecule is  made up of just four kinds of atoms: Phosphorous, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, and Carbon. Yet, 204 billion of these four atoms go into the composition of each invisible strand of DNA in our bodies.  Lucky Strikes used to brag about being fully packed, but the way those tobacco strands were rolled tight was nothing in comparison to the way God packs those elements into our bodies.