A Reflection for Tuesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
“God said, ‘Let the water teem with an abundance of living creatures, and on the earth let birds fly beneath the dome of the sky.’” (Gen 1:20)
My dad’s first dental office shared a waiting room with a mortuary. A kind of creation story. A waiting room bearing twin griefs. Grief over the beloved dead, grief over the coming dentistic assault. Such a creation! Omaha in the early 1960s. They lived in a small house that was pink, my parents and their young kids—a pink house, this is true.
You are enough and there is enough and God has declared all of it good.
Who considers the dentist, his toil, his chagrin, all those people coming at you with fear in their bones! How must it feel to be a dentist, day after day assaulted with your patients’ mute terror, as you come at them with the gleaming weapons of your trade. It must get into your bones, your sinews, this fear; the confusing phenomenon of people intentionally coming to see you who do not want to see you.
And yet abundance. Always abundance. “Let the water teem with an abundance of living creatures,” declares Genesis in the original creation story. And let the sky teem abundantly, and the earth, and the soul of a man and a woman and their progeny. Abundance. There is more than enough to go around. There was then and there is now.
If your business begins in a repository of the dead (or your life, your anything), if fear stalks you from all angles, still, there is and there will be abundance. You are enough and there is enough and God has declared all of it good. The world is teeming, and your soul, if you let it. It does not matter what it seems like out there, everything will be O.K. God has begun it and God will end it and there is enough.
