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Commentary on Psalm 93
Jesus says:
“How often man, especially in these times, asks, ‘Why, Lord, don’t You intervene to punish? Give the proud, the wicked, what they deserve. If You are just, how can You let the wicked triumph and your faithful suffer?’
“Children, I shall remind you of some words in the Gospel: ‘ Before removing the splinter from your brother’s eye, take the beam out of your own.’190
“It is true that you are tormented by the ‘great sinners.’ But not even you are without sin. Your sins, much smaller than the enormous ones of the corruptors of the world, have continually been building up until provoking God’s indignation.
“You must consider that God, Perfection and Justice, judges the great and the small, and He is repelled by the great sin of the great and the lesser sin of the small. If, then, He were to intervene to punish the great, as you implore, why is it not licit for Him to punish you for your repeated and numerous sins?
“They are the sins of whole nations. Their citizens have forgotten God and replaced Him with numberless other gods, ranging from a ‘man’ to an idea, from an idea to a set of moral - that is, amoral - habits, among which there is not one that is approved by God.
“What has happened, then? What happens with a landslide involving sand. There are places on the earth where, because of a special structure and composition of the terrain, sands transported slowly but continually by the winds build up at one specific point. Centuries are required, but the time comes when the build-up is such that it can no longer be supported by that furrow in the earth, and it shakes it off, provoking catastrophes which swallow up towns and sometimes whole cities.
“If man were careful, he would take steps to counterbalance the work of the winds with his own work and sweep away these deposits with a tenacity equal to that of the elements. He does not pay attention, however, but, rather, is glad that they bring layers of earth where there was previously rock or cover an estuary with sand, increasing the area which may be cultivated; and he exploits the pseudogift of the treacherous wind and the deceitful current, turning it into a source of gain for the sake of greater pleasure and success, perhaps to the detriment of the nearest town.
“Take a look at that grain of dust? Why, of course not! What harm can it do? So much harm in its minuteness, which becomes large through the cooperation of numberless other minor factors, that it provokes a catastrophe. There is nothing smaller than a grain of sand. But put millions and billions of them together and then have them plunge down, and you see what a horrible death they cause.
“What is that defect? That amoral habit? Nothing - a trifle. A serious sin? Why, no! A venial sin? Not even that! A single imperfection due to the fast pace of life today, the pressures of a set of circumstances. You tell yourselves, ‘We are no longer in the middle ages. One has got to be up-to-date. With broader views. I mustn’t think God is always there with a pen and paper to note down my omissions, my acts of self-seeking, and my compromises. Today I preferred to devote myself to a business deal rather than go to Sunday Mass or even engage in those ten minutes of conversation with God which constitute morning or evening prayer. But if I had not taken advantage of this morning, I would not have had another chance to meet that customer or that professional; why, if I had wasted those ten minutes, I would have missed the occasion to arrive on time. Tomorrow....’
“Ten minutes! You were snuggling in bed for half an hour and arguing with your wife and servants for another half hour - almost an hour preening yourself like the effete. And then you don’t find ten minutes for your God. You have six days to deal with business affairs, and you dawdle about without bringing anything to a close. Only on Sunday morning do you find it urgently necessary to do those things. But that professional or customer is free only on Sunday! Why? If no one were available because of his bad habits, he would have to decide to devote himself to business on the other six days.
“Both of you are amoral and have no concern for God. That’s all there is to it.
“And, similarly: ‘What’s so bad about my little calumny? It isn’t even calumny - it’s gossip. Not even that - it’s a joke told behind Tom’s and Dick’s back, just for a laugh, to show that one is well informed, to get into the good graces of superiors and the influential. But you really esteem that person at heart. You know - you’ve got to handle bosses with kid gloves to win their protection and good jobs. You know - it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and if I, who have a family with a lot of needs, occupy your post, all the better. Anyway, you, friend, are able to live on a more modest scale.’
“And you thus steal someone’s reputation and job. You are thieves, O hypocrites, to fulfill your requirements and satisfy the whims of family epicureanism and social or female vanity.
“And, similarly: ‘What’s so bad about courting that woman a bit or her letting herself be wooed? It means taking the monotony out of life. We later go back to being just friends, as before. Matters with no consequences. We mustn’t be Puritans.’
“You are adulterers, O hypocrites. And you sometimes are in the sight of your children, who seem not to see, but who see everything, and whom you scandalize and force into judging you.
“ ‘ What’s so bad about becoming emancipated from one’s parents or husband, being independent, leading one’s life as one pleases? What does it matter if marriage is rendered an asset in having a wife as a nurse and servant or a husband as someone who works for our needs and whims, but not a mission of procreation and child-rearing? It is fine for children not to arrive or to arrive in small numbers. They are a cause for concern, an expense, and a source of acrimony among relatives and among the very children who have preceded them. No more children after one or two who have really insisted on being born - who knows how. And once they have been born, we won’t go wearing ourselves out over them - a wet nurse, baby sitters, a governess, and boarding school.’ That’s the way you talk.
“You are assassins, O hypocrites. You suppress lives or souls. For, you must realize, no matter how good a boarding school is or how perfect a governess is, they are never a mother, a father, and a family. How can those children, who have been the children of everyone except you, love you with the great love which continues to remain united to your interior as if it were rooted in you? How can those children understand you if you are strangers to them, and they to you? What society can emerge from peoples in which the first form of society, the family, is an arid, dead, dismembered entity? A state of anarchy in which each thinks of himself, even if he does not think of harming the others?
“And that money you save in denying birth to a child - what do you think it means to your pocketbook? Woodworm destroying the substance, for what you do not spend on a child is spent three times over on amusements and useless, harmful luxuries. And why do you get married, then, if you don’t want to have children? What do you reduce the marriage bed to? Respect for my ‘spokesman’ leads Me to silence my reply. Tell yourselves the answer, unworthy ones.
“They are so many little matters, if compared to the crimes of the great sinners. But they provoke the avalanche. The one submerging you.
“I have already stated191 this: ‘If the great had been faced with (I don’t speak of opposition, but of being faced with) a healthy people in a moral, Christian sense, solidly obedient to the law of God and of human morality as well, they could not have arrived at their crimes. Their Satanism would have broken like a glass sword against a block of granite and been pulverized. And God would have blessed and protected you.
“But you have admired the major criminals, in whom you saw that perfection in crime which you could not reach, that perfection in amorality which you liked because it justified your own. You said, ‘If he, whom we admire, acts like this, I, too, can act this way.’ You said, ‘If God protects him, who is like this, He will also protect me, who am much less.’
“O fools! Why, do you really think that I protect one who, to succeed and manage to make someone else an accomplice so as to triumph by any means, ‘has slain the widow and the guest and slaughtered orphans’? (verse 6) One who has betrayed the trust of others? One who has lied to whole peoples? One who has not hesitated to push whole nations to disaster? But I see and hear and note. And it is my sorrow not to be able to intervene, for when I intervene, you frustrate the intervention with your wickedness. You are so poisoned that you turn a good into an evil.
“I shall now speak to you as if you were all upright in heart - all of you, even those who are not upright. I want to invite you once more.
“My people, come to the Lord. I, the Lord, will not reject the, people that comes to Me, and, if it remains close to Me, I shall provide for it ‘until justice becomes judgment - that is, until time comes to an end and eternity begins’ (verse 15). I shall open my arms to shield those who believe in Me and invoke Me with a contrite heart trusting in my mercy, and ‘I shall defend them from those hunting down the just and condemning innocent blood’ (verse 21). There are few of this kind on earth, but far the sake of those few I shall still grant grace.
“But - and it is your God who is imploring you - come back to Me. Please come back to Me. Free yourselves individually from your sins of lack of faith, moral disobedience, and sevenfold vice, and I shall then free the collectivity from its scourges.”
190 Matthew 7:3-5; Luke 6:41-42.
191 See July 28, in The Notebooks. 1943.