Thoughts from Fr. Leo

Auto accidents always seem to catch my eye in the newspaper. The other day, I noticed a recent weekend had five fatalities. One was a motorcyclist who was not wearing a helmet. The other four were people who were ejected from their vehicles because they were not wearing their seat belts. It seems like buckling up is a simple thing to do, but it often seems like an inconvenience. There are some people who automatically fasten their seatbelts when they enter a vehicle. They don't even think about it. Others of us know we should wear our seatbelts, but just don't do it. For those of us who may not be as inclined to buckle-up, the law says that we are suppose to.

I think there are a lot of things in our life that are like seatbelts. There are things that we know we should, or maybe should not, do, but we fail because of it may cause us an inconvenience. We don't want to be bothered with some of the little things that we know could save our lives. Many of the moral principles upon which our lives are to be directed are the seatbelts we fail to fasten. We try to rationalize reasons for not following the moral principles of our faith. An example with the seatbelt would be, "I'm only going to the store," or, "I'm not driving on the highway."

In the moral realm this may take the form of statements like, "We are deeply committed to each other so we can act like we are married," or "It is only tissue, so I can abort it."

In the temporal world, we have laws that the government has enacted that we need to follow, usually for our own temporal well being. They may keep us alive. In the spiritual world, we have natural law, the law that God implants in our hearts and reveals to us more fully through scripture, that are present for our eternal well being. They may keep us from going to hell.

Like the people who put their seatbelts on out of habit, we need to live our moral lives out of habit. It only becomes a habit if we work hard to make it a part of our lives each day. Just as in a car we can learn that "seatbelts save lives", we know we need to buckle up our moral actions, the life (soul) we save may be our own.

Fr. Leo