What seems to make Christianity unique among religions is its claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate (“in the flesh”).

Not just a good man, but literally divine.

This annoys atheists, agnostics etc.

It annoys also many others who just want to get on with their lives, un- bothered by religion.

Christ’s divinity is also disturbing for his believers.

It tells them that God wants us to hand our lives over to supernatural forces — to give up conforming with the materialistic, distraction-seeking mentalities that our neighbours and friends expect of us.

* * *

Today is the Second Sunday of Lent.

Today’s gospel reading is exquisitely discomforting to those who don’t want Jesus to be divine or to make demands of them.

It describes a mysterious, awesome and unsettling event:

After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John his brother, and brought them up into a high mountain apart: And he was transfigured before them.

His face did shine as the sun: his garments became white as snow.

And behold there appeared to them Moses and Elias, talking with him.

(They spoke of his decease that he should accomplish in Jerusalem.)

And Peter said to Jesus: ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make three tabernacles, one for thee, one for Moses, and one for Elias.’

As he was yet speaking, behold a bright cloud overshadowed them. And a voice out of the cloud, saying: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: hear ye him.’

The disciples hearing it, fell upon their faces, and were very much afraid.

Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Arise, and fear not.’

And they, lifting up their eyes, saw no one but only Jesus.

As they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying: ‘Tell the vision to no man, till the Son of man be risen from the dead.’

* * *

The disciples learned a lot from this event:

 * that Jesus is/was truly God

 * that to please God we must be willing to suffer

 * that to live pleasing to God we must depend on him giving us the strength

 * that Jesus alone speaks with God’s full authority

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To believe that two plus two equals four does not require faith.

It is just something that you notice to be true. It is self-evident.

It is a natural truth and no supernatural input is necessary to see that it is true.

* * *

To know that God exists is another example of the same thing.

The need for a Cause for creation to exist – which exists in its own right and is not itself a part of creation — is also self-evident.

The arguments against God existing are always a little bit more complicated, because they have the disadvantage of being nonsense.

* * *

Yet there are things we need to know about God which are not so obvious.

God wants us to know, not just that he exists, but also that he loves us.

This is something that we do not just notice but must, by an act of free will, choose to believe.

To live as though God is a loving God means, not just a nodding acceptance, but more of a self-giving.

To live as though a loving God has plans for our lives involves taking risks for him.

This is where all true faith is “blind” faith. That is the nature of faith. Not that faith goes against reason. No, it goes beyond reason and gives reason a reason to exist.

As Saint Mary Magdalen de Pazzi wrote:

“Not to believe in you, O my God, requires more ‘faith’ than to believe in you. Your love for me is so great that I no longer need ‘faith’ to believe in it.”

* * *

Human suffering is sometimes quoted as a reason to doubt God. But is not suffering an opportunity, not to abandon belief, but to put it on a deeper level?

Blessed Mary MacKillop wrote to her mother:

“In the trials, annoyances and anxieties we daily experience, may we ever recognise that loving Fatherly Hand that only seeks to draw us closer to himself by giving us opportunities to suffer something for him.”

Today is the first Sunday in Lent.

Some Anglican bishops in England are getting headlines this Lent by asking their followers to do, this year, a “carbon fast”

They are talking about less using of energy-guzzling luxury items — including, for some reason, iPods.

Has the climate-change lobby skyjacked Lent?

* * *

There’s nothing wrong with cutting our carbon-based energy use. That is something we can do any time . . . and perhaps we should.

Would it “save the planet”? Who knows.

The important thing to remember this Lent is that saving-the-planet is not what God gives us Lent, Passiontide and Easter for.

There is something more important at stake than the planet.

The stakes are higher — spiritual, infinite and eternal.

* * *

Jesus Christ spent 40 days in the desert between Jerusalem and Jericho, fasting, before he started on his public life.

That’s why the Church asks Catholics to spend Lent — 40 days before the seasons of Our Lord’s Passion and Easter – preparing our souls for the supernatural climax of the year.

The traditional methods of preparation are “fasting, prayers and works of charity”.

* * *

So the most important thing about Lent is to make ourselves humble.

We need God. Without him we are nothing.

Our thoughts towards God should be like those of Saint Catherine of Siena:

“Your Passion is neither desired nor loved by anyone who loves himself, but only by the one who has stripped himself of self, and clothed himself with you . . . .”

Although Our Lord can no longer suffer, we, his Church, his Body on earth, can suffer . . . .

And  if we willingly accept our sufferings, offering them up to him, he can use our fasting, prayers and charity to continue his work of redemption in the world.

The Queensland Bligh government intends to “reform” surrogacy laws – their philosophy being, apparently, that a baby is a toy — that anybody who wants one has a “right” to one.

A different attitude might be to put the “rights” of the child first.

* * *

Should not the state always do everything possible to try to give every child at least the chance to start life with the love and care of their real mother and father?

Isn’t it wrong to separate a child, in cold blood, from his birth mother — and then falsify his birth certificate to make it “legal”?

Dumping a child, without his consent, into complex, unnatural relationships, expecting him to like it or to lump it?

* * *

Remember the baby in the Mary Beth Whitehead surrogacy case (USA, 1986). The child she bore was confiscated by police. During subsequent “access” times the baby sought birth-mother Mary Beth’s breast, for both nutrition and comfort. The court-appointed supervisor wouldn’t let her nurse, “lest it create a mother-child bond”!  

Too late, mate — and very stupid.

* * *

What is it like to be a child subjected to surrogacy? The infertility experts don’t know. The social scientists don’t know.

The politicians certainly don’t know. And they certainly don’t want to know.

No one knows except the surrogated people themselves.

Thousands of adult surrogacy-victim Australians are involved in support groups such as Tangled Webs, whose policy is clear:

A child should only be removed from his or her genetic parents in extreme circumstances as a last resort for their safety. The desire to provide children for infertile couples etc. does not override the child’s need for and right to this vital relationship with his or her genetic parents . . . No-one has the right to a child. To claim the right to a child is to treat that child, another human being, as an end to satisfying one’s own desires, as an object and not as a person . . . . (http://www.tangledwebs.org.au/dc.php)

* * *

Yes, to demand the right to a child is to treat children as an item of property, just as slaves were once considered the rightful property of their masters — and women were once regarded as the property of their husbands.

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In the United States, someone called Pat Robertson is upsetting people by calling the present sufferings of the people of Haiti, God’s punishment for their voodoo religion.

The media are labelling his remarks as “shocking”, “stupid”, “backward” etc.

Yet don’t these same media call so-called “global warming” Mother Nature’s way of making us suffer for our addiction to fossil fuels?

* * *

Mother Mary MacKillop knew about suffering. It surrounded her in the rough, poverty-stricken Australia of the 1800s. And she herself, for years, suffered painful illness and, later, paralysis following a stroke.

Blessed Mary made it her life’s purpose, to relieve suffering: educating the uneducated, sheltering the homeless.

She helped the suffering, also, by showing them a reason for their suffering — that there is a God who loves us, despite appearances.

She offered them the example of Christ, who “humbled himself and suffered for us . . . let us be glad to show him we are willing to suffer whatever he deigns to ask of us.”

She taught the Sisters how “sorrow or trial lovingly submitted to does not prevent our being happy — it rather purifies the happiness”.

* * *

Jesus Christ was once asked, regarding a blind man, “Who has sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?”

 He answered, “Neither has this man sinned, nor his parents. He was born blind so that the works of God might be revealed in him.”  

Jesus then proceeded, not only to heal the man’s physical eyes, but also to open his spiritual eyes.

 He then asked him, “Do you believe in the Son of God?”

 “Who is he, Lord, that I may believe in him?”

 “You have both seen him, and he it is who is speaking with you now.”

 The man answered, “Lord, I believe.” 

 And falling down, he worshipped him.

* * *

Ultimately that is all the answer we are going to get: do what Jesus did, respond to suffering by healing and by helping those who suffer.

Learn something, too, from that blind man: learn that our response to suffering must be to accept whatever comes from the hands of a loving God — and to fall down before him and worship him.

Yesterday, November 20, 2009, was the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Convention, adopted by the UN General Assembly on November 20, 1989, and ratified by Australia, restated positions taken by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, concerning the “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” and how “the UN has proclaimed that childhood is entitled to special care and assistance”.

* * *

The situation of the world’s children has, in fact, improved slightly during those last 20 years, although the facts remain unbearably tragic.

The UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), in its latest State of the World’s Children report, reveals that “only” eight million died before their fifth birthday in 2008 (twenty years ago the figure was 12.5 million).Four million died from preventable diseases like diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia.

One billion children still lack at least one essential service, such as health care, education, clean water, sanitation or adequate shelter. More than 100 million do not attend primary school. 22 million do not receive regular immunisations. 150 million are forced into labour. 1.2 million are trafficked each year.

* * *

So is there still something fundamentally wrong with our attitude to children?

The Convention on the Rights of the Child asserts: “States Parties recognise that every child has the inherent right to life” and that “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth”.

Before birth?

Senator Gareth Evans, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, assured the Senate on October 26, 1989 that the Australian Government understood that the reference to the rights of the child “before as well as after birth” did not preclude abortion.

Ho hum.

So what is a child? What does a child have to do, or be, for us to accord him/her the “rights” about which we prattle so much . . . ?

* * *

Once again, as always, an important matter of principle means nothing if we do not discipline ourselves to treat it as a religious matter.

Leave God out of the “rights” debate, and we end up according rights only to those whom we find convenient and/or cute to have around.

One might seem to be a spoilsport to mention this fact.

But while we turn a blind eye to the supernatural aspects we get more or less nowhere, and the little corpses keep piling up.

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