Spiritual Hiccups - Straining to See

I just checked The Weather Channel homepage, and Tropical Storm Tomas is still headed for Haiti.  I suppose this might not be earth shattering news, especially as Tomas is no longer a hurricane, except that there are still thousands and thousands of Haitians living in tent cities in the aftermath of last year's earthquake.  And the winds and rain of Tomas come on the heels of a cholera outbreak in these tent cities.

It is easy to look at the situation in Haiti and fall into despair.  After all the attention, the donations, and the telethon following the earthquake, the situation is still so dire.  And of course Haiti is only one example.

Situations such as this make it easy to understand how the Church took only a few generations to move from talking about God's coming Kingdom to talking about heaven when you die.  Jesus spoke over and over about the Kingdom, God's new day that had drawn near, that was at hand.  He spoke of how it lifted up the poor and oppressed while pulling down the rich and powerful.  But as the years went by, and as the Church was embraced by the Emperor Constantine, by the rich and the powerful, hope for the Kingdom turned into hope for a better life when one died.

We've been talking this way for so many centuries that it is a bit hard even to glimpse the Kingdom that Jesus says is all around us.  In today's gospel, Jesus says that the Kingdom is like the tiniest seed or a bit of leaven, something scarcely visible that transforms its world. 

As I look at our world, straining to see some signs of the Kingdom, I sometimes wonder why it seems so hard to spot it.  Is God dallying in bringing the Kingdom?  Or are we blind to the Kingdom and so failing to be the seed and yeast we are supposed to be?  Or maybe I simply miss the seed and yeast because they are so small.  A little help here, God?

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