I have come across the expression "practical atheists" to describe people who profess to believe in God and may even attend church, but their day to day decisions are made as if there were no God. I suspect this is a danger for most of us. It is so easy to get up in thinking in worldly terms. It makes sense that we need to make a conscious effort to counteract the tendency.
-- Edited by Jaynek on Monday 25th of June 2012 10:42:20 AM
I heard a very good homily yesterday. Among other things, the priest was talking about St. John the Baptist as exemplifying the virtue of hope and made some interesting points about hope.
The vices opposed to hope are despair and presumption. I had heard that before. Then the priest talked about another way people can oppose hope that I had not heard about. We can replace supernatural hope with a focus on worldly problems and solutions. An extreme form of this problem is "liberation theology". Our concerns about helping people in temporal ways need to be within the context of hope for their salvation. To direct our hopes to worldy issues alone is a perversion of the virtue.
The priest was recommending that we keep our focus on supernatural hope by regularly making an act of hope, ideally every day. This reminds us that our main hope is for salvation.
That is very good advice. One can apply the same distinction to other situations in the Church where some kind of human hope comes into play, such as when there is a trust that by political silence the situation in the Church can be solved. It is a question of putting trust in grace. Of course it is not a question of total passivity on man's part, so that he expects God to solve everything with no prudential actions of man, but of seeing that one's prudence is insufficient to arrive at the solution, which must be provided by God. Our job is to be faithful to the supernatural order.
