SACRED HEART PARISH
Waterlooville 

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

On Tuesday of last week, March 31st., I received a telephone enquiry about my advertisement for an organist from – of all places – Garland, Dallas, Texas. This was a remarkable coincidence, for I was then able to ask the enquirer if he had seen God. And that wasn’t part of the job specification. Rather, on that very day, God was supposed to have appeared in Garland, Texas and taken his beloved ones away with him in great golden balls of light. This encounter was meant to have happened at No. 3513, Ridgedale Drive, Garland, home of Mr. Heng-ming Chen, leader of the "God’s Salvation Church". So certain were members of this church that God was coming to take them in a blaze of glory that 40 families had sold their own homes and bought adjacent properties in Ridgedale Drive, presumably for no mean price.

The first inkling that something was wrong came the previous week, when Mr. Chen had declared that God would appear on television after the end of scheduled broadcasting in order to ‘confirm the travel arrangements’ for the group, so to speak. God did not appear.

Members of the Church were sure Mr. Chen was right because ‘Garland’ sounded like ‘God’s land’. Well, now we see the error. It might do in an American accent. But as we know God doesn’t have an American accent; he has an English one. The whole idea falls to the ground.

Seriously though, how many people throughout history have expected sudden, violent and amazing divine appearances to solve the woes of the world (or if not of the world, at least of themselves). And of course God could do so; he could have created a world where sin was impossible, he could have obliterated the world when it failed to please him. There are innumerable ways in which God could terrify us by his power.

But he has chosen another way, the way of Holy Week, which we follow in these sacred days. Beginning with a journey on a (with respect) comic animal and – apparently – ending in ignominy on a deserted hillock. But the story does not end there; it continues to Resurrection, not in great globes of light as failed to materialise in Dallas, but in Christ’s encounters with bewildered people in the half-light before sunrise. To appreciate the power of God we should (if we could) stay up and witness the Easter dawn. In those first rays of light, as nature begins to stir, dwells all God’s glory – a glory offered not to a lucky few, but to all.