CELEBRATE SUNDAY
WITH ST. MARY'S
THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

God can be made present through the physical world.
THE THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
We experience the world around us only through our physical senses. All things can be knowable in this world as long as we can see them, or hear them, or feel them, or smell them. The senses were a gift given to us by God as inhabitants of the physical world so that we may know the domains that were entrusted to us by Him, all while uniting our senses to the innate spiritual knowledge that exists from our souls. We are physical and spiritual beings, as God created us. But when we reject our spirits, we begin to limit our scope of understanding to our physical senses. To know God, to acknowledge His presence and more importantly His love for us, we not only must be in touch with our spirits, but also with our bodies and our senses.

READ THIS SUNDAY'S MESSAGE
God is usually rejected because He does not seem to be immediately present in the physical world according to our senses. Ask an atheist how they would come to start believing in God, and they will probably tell you they want to see His face, hear His booming voice, touch His form if there is one. They want evidence, and evidence is collected by our senses. The mistake here is understanding God, the Divine and almighty Creator of all things in existence, to be part of creation rather than outside of that which He created. If God was knowable by our senses, He would merely be existing within creation rather than outside of it. Additionally, we acknowledge things to exist outside of our senses: things like honor or peace or joy are knowable, but only as esoteric concepts that come after physical things. Our very purpose in life is love, and love is not immediately sensed. We can know these things, though, only through our participation in the physical world, and even then, our processing of the world around us can be incomplete. A blind person cannot see; does this mean that the world is not visible? A deaf person cannot hear; does this mean the world is not audible? One with all their physical senses intact should still know that their senses may be limited even compared to other creatures; the world is knowable even with our limitations, and the gaps can be filled with the spirits God instilled within each one of us. This is the message of Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, as he speaks of the individual parts within a body. The eyes help see, the ears help hear, the nose helps smell, the hands help feel. No part of the body is meaningless because each part allows us to experience the world more fully. If you have no eyes or no ears or no hands, you can still experience the world, but the world is just more knowable with every working part functioning as it should.
God is not found in the gaps, as atheists or those who doubt might think. God can be found through the senses, in the physical world, because He imparted Himself into every detail of creation as all creators do. Consider the Eucharist: all five basic senses can be used to recognize the God of our universe present within the Host. But even apart from the Source and Summit of our faith, God actually confined Himself to exist within His creation. In the person of Jesus Christ, through the Incarnation, we could see God’s face, hear His voice, touch the holes in his hands where the nails were. Just as God became knowable completely according to our senses, God continues to be knowable completely according to our spirits. We all play a role in the Mystical Body of Christ according to our gifts and our callings, but it is through His Church and through each other that we make God present in the physical world. As St. Theresa said, “Christ has no body now but yours.” Use the spirit God gave you. Make God knowable to a world that cares only about the senses by giving God your body, your hands, your feet, your eyes. Let Him work through you, so that the creator may be found within His creation where so much of the world desperately wants to find Him.