This is really the root question for any consideration of the decreased numbers of parishioners at Sunday Mass. Why are those people missing?
For some, that absence may reflect unresolved hurt or anger with God or the Church. For others, it is simply a question of just feeling too busy to set aside that hour for God each week within our harried and hectic schedules. For many, however, it is centered on that most basic of faith questions: “Who needs God?”
We live in a world of science and technology that seemingly offers all the answers to the tough question without bringing God into the equation. Within a society that values rugged individualism and self-sufficiency, is it any wonder that the Religion Section at bookstores has been shrinking over the past twenty-five years as the ‘Self Help’ Section seems to expand exponentially?
For parents, one of their most painful and poignant moments is the critical juncture when their young child refuses their assistance with some simple task, declaring, “I don’t need you! I can do it myself!” Parents know that this is the first step that their child is taking toward self-reliance, not a bad thing in itself since it is a parent’s job to bring their children to stand on their own two feet and take responsibility for their own lives; but it is still difficult for a parent to gaze upon a child who was once so dependent upon them and to hear that they are no longer needed as much they were before.
Is that something we might also recognize in our personal relationship with God? that I can stand on my own two feet as an independent person and proclaim: “I can take care of myself, God! I don’t need your help anymore!” Is that bold proclamation at the heart of the spiritual malaise that has rendered God irrelevant and faith so peripheral to so many? Have we become a people who believe that we can ‘go it alone’ without God?
That is the challenge posed by the Prophet Jeremiah to the people of Israel that could be posed as easily to the people of our own day:
“Thus says the Lord,
Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings (or him self!)
Whose heart turns away from the Lord.”
Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
Whose hope is in the Lord.
He is like a tree planted beside the waters
That stretches out its roots to the stream
In the year of drought it shows no distress,
But still bears fruit.”
Jeremiah recognized that many people in his day did not feel that they needed God during the good times. When everything was going right, they could handle things on their own, but the prophet’s words assure us that times will not always be so good and that times of heart-ache and trouble will come, and then we may not be able to handle everything on our own. But who will we turn to if we have relegated God to the periphery of our lives and have failed to nurture a sustained faith relationship with the Lord?
Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and it represents an invitation to place God once again at the center of our lives, recognizing that we never outgrow our need for God. Our right relationship with God demands our admission of our need for God and the help of His grace. Lent represents a graced opportunity to nurture anew our relationship with God in the good times in the confidence that God will be there for us in the times when we need Him most!