The Problem of "Pane"

A Reflection on the Psalm for Sunday, September 24th, 2023:
Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

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Psalm 145

R. The Lord is near to all who call on him.

Every day I will bless you, and praise your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; his greatness is unsearchable. 

R. The Lord is near to all who call on him.

The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.

R. The Lord is near to all who call on him.

The Lord is just in all his ways, and kind in all his doings. The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.

​R. The Lord is near to all who call on him.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

Sometimes, making a decision is so difficult, it’s painful. We say “I’m torn,” and it really feels that way. I can relate and, surprisingly, so can God.

In the Psalm for this Sunday, we read that God’s “compassion is over all that he has made.” We know that compassion means to “suffer with.” The Lord suffers with all His creatures. Pondering this, I thought, “Wait, all his creatures?” He created all things, earthly and celestial. Does He suffer with angels? Does He suffer with the googly-eyed beasts in Revelation? Hold on, does he suffer with demons?

This called for Google. 

No, God does not suffer with demons. The second person of God did not die to redeem demons. This is because the angels and demons made their choice – God or not-God – in an instant. Their choice is eternal; a demon can’t repent.

But we can choose. We can choose wrong, but we can also repent. We are in flux our whole lives. And that’s hard. You might even say, that’s insufferable.

We have finite bodies and exist in this funny thing called time. We have these limited things called senses and these narrow things called perspectives. We are not in total, inseparable union with God – not until we reach heaven. For every living human, even the holiest saints, these pesky things place a barrier, a veil, between us and God. Like a pane of glass, whether it's as thin as a contact lens or as thick as Stonehenge, that  separation causes our soul’s suffering. And it's that pain(/pane) of His creatures that God suffers with. He has compassion on his creatures suffering in the constant battle to keep choosing Him until we get to Him in totality in heaven. 

In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus as both human and God, experienced simultaneously the most perfect love a human can have and the most perfect love God has. And in that moment, they did not feel like the same thing. How very human. And it was, truly, agony.

Thinking about it, I realized that all the gifts and graces God gives us are to make this  separating membrane a little thinner, the waiting pangs a little easier to bear. Wisdom, knowledge, counsel and understanding make it more transparent, or at least translucent, so we can see up to Him and we can see His light down on us. Piety and filial fear soothe the pain like a hug. And fortitude keeps us chugging along when we start to wonder if those separation pangs are worth it or will ever end. As I prayed my rosary, asking with each decade for patience, purity, etc, they all made sense in this light. They are each (forgive me) pane-killers.

Let us pray through Mary for an extra “dose” of these gifts and graces. Amen!

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Kate Mosher

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