God knocks on hardened hearts. Will we open?

LET’S face it. If there is a God, we’re done for. I mean humanity. Sure, most people still believe in Him, at least according to surveys. But how many of us actually listen to Him and do His will?

There’s the King of all and sundry, the Creator of the universe, and millions of people won’t give Him the time of day.

Or worse: We’re messing up His world, including His masterpiece: Us.

- tions to spend countless billions of dollars on arms, including nuclear weapons able to destroy all life on earth many times over, and then threaten to incinerate one another?

Or shower the richest two percent of people with most of the wealth created on the planet, while more than a billion souls are hungry, sick, homeless, and destitute?

And perhaps most distressing to Him, the men of God who are supposed to represent Him and impart His teachings on earth are preaching or doing despicable things.

In his recent visit to Chile, Pope Francis provoked a storm of protest over his defense of Barros Madrid, whose sex abuse accusers the Holy Father dis- missed as speaking with no evidence.

It reminds one of an even bigger Latin American scandal: the Legion of Christ founder Marcial Maciel Degollado, who enjoyed Vatican favor for decades, partly due to the huge contributions the disgraced Mexican priest raised for the Catholic Church.

faiths have also incited ungodly acts. Buddhist monks are said to have encouraged Myanmar’s Burmese majority in persecuting the country’s Muslim Rohingya, who and alleged ethnic cleansing.

And the world is aghast over the extremist terrorism instigated, if not organized by Muslim clerics, who have perverted Islam to help Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, violent cabals lure believers into committing mass murder. “calumny”

Who will speak for God?

With religious leaders also breaking divine edicts, atheists and secular humanists have urge society to ditch faith and follow science. But considering the wars, environmental despoliation, destitution, exploitation, and oppression also perpetrated under secular governments and institutions, including modern industries, going Godless cannot but give some pause.

Hence, others may argue that what we need is not less religion, but more: a revival of traditional religious and moral values, from righteousness, justice, and compassion, to wholesome family living, frugality and honest work, and reverence, not rapaciousness, toward creation. Instead of trashing old ways and morals, rekindle them.

Today’s Catholic mass readings speak precisely of God sending prophets to speak His word and will ( in the first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy), calling on people to listen and not harden their hearts (Psalm 95), and giving God and His wisdom and wishes a special place in one’s life and soul (Corinthians).

And in the Gospel of St. Mark, our Lord Himself speaks for His Father in heaven “a new teaching with authority.”

In fact, what God’s messengers and His Son mouthed are nothing new, but the age-old tenets of heaven, which later generations have been forgotten, twisted, and otherwise lost over centuries of pursuing man’s self- serving agenda, even in faith and morals.

So it is today. Remember the Ten Commandments? Well, modern marketing and advertising have generated billions in sales by getting people to violate the Ninth and Tenth Commandments against coveting wealth and sexual pleasure.

Our Lord preached the Golden Rule, but our age follows a different version of that millennia-old tenet. Not “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you,” but “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

The saint whose feast falls on this day, the 13th Century Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas, warned against the Seven Capital Sins: pride, avarice, gluttony, lust, sloth, envy, and anger.

But in our materialistic age, it’s not only right but admirable to bask in vainglory, pile up billions in the bank just for the heck of it, eat, drink and copulate to one’s - today’s reality TV shows and the evening news.

Hard of hearing and heart

Thankfully, even today when fewer and fewer listen to them, God continues to send prophets, that is, people who speak for Him, His word and will.

In the face of permissiveness and deviant lifestyles, they preach a return to family values. To people enamored of wealth and power, they admonish frugality and charity. Rather than arrogance and vanity, they practice and preach humility and modesty.

Most of all, they clearly, repeatedly and unequivocally give worship, honor, prayer, and service to God. Not just some lofty ideals, but the Almighty Himself.

While the 21st Century, especially the West, frowns upon open religiosity, God’s messengers do exactly that.

Of course, people nowadays don’t go for that way of living. Hearts are hardened by ambition, avarice, hedonism, and great pride in modern affluence and technology.

So, even as our Lord’s prophets proclaim His word to a world that has snuffed out His enlightenment, modern man counters that it is he who has the light, while those preaching the old faith are in the dark.

Now, one can see why many believers think the only way for God to get man’s attention is for the clockwork world he thinks he created to fall apart.

And it will.