Saturday, 4th Week of Ordinary Time (II)

February 7,2004

by Rev. Herbert Nichols

In the first reading today we hear the author pray: Give your servant an understanding heart to distinguish right from wrong. Certainly that is an appropriate prayer.

It’s also a question that stirs uneasiness within our spirit. As a traveling missionary, I visit a lot of parishes and dioceses, but almost everywhere in the confessional I hear the same remark: I liked the good old days when everything was spelled out and everybody knew what to confess. Today it’s so different.

And I have to reply. That is very true. Not that sin has changed, but that our perspective on sin has changed. Things we once immediately recognized as sins, we now shrug off and things which never thought a sin, now we have to give a second look.

In the first reading Solomon goes to the Shrine at Gibeon to make a spectacular offering to the Lord, and in the course of his prayer, he asks for the gift of a wise and discerning heart in governing his people. The exact location of Gibeon is disputed today, but any place where we are with the lord in silence and intimacy is a "Gibeon", a place where we can seek and find wisdom.

It is in the reception and the grace filled use of this gift that his birth name, Jedidiah, is changed to Solomon. The gift, for which he asked, although for himself, was a quality he would use for the benefit of others.

He requested a practical wisdom in his task of judging and governing God’s people. Wisdom as gift from God is not learned from books. Rather, it knows how to order all the circumstances of our life to serve our own spiritual well being and that of others.

Our life today is filled with information, facts, and factoids. It has been called the information age as we seek to accumulate, process, and transmit huge amounts of information at lightening speed. We have more information available for our use than any other since civilization began.

But it is an open question, whether we are the wisest society since civilization began. Do we use the information to serve the Lord, to build up His kingdom, and to strengthen our spirituality?

When we come before the Lord in our personal Gibeon, we offer Him the sacrifices of our daily lives. In so doing we seek to draw all of the threads of our being into the fabric of God’s Divine Am—ness.

Whether we are in a position of leadership like Solomon, or equally important, that of a disciple, a follower of Christ; without prayer for the Wisdom of the Lord, the Gift of the Holy Spirit, we cannot be complete. It is in prayer where we find that Wisdom in our personal Giobeon.