By Blake Thamer
This Christmas break I had the opportunity to visit Norway and stay in a parish there for about two weeks. I had several great experiences, but one of them was after a Sunday Mass at the coffee time. There is a Scandinavian tradition for the community to visit after Mass. They take it seriously, and I appreciated getting to know them.
While I was meeting people, I talked to a little girl who asked three questions. The first was in Norwegian and I couldn’t understand it. Next, she switched to English and asked “Do you speak.. Norway?” I said, “No.” She asked her third question. “Who made God?” I was sort of startled, and thought, “How does that question follow up from, ‘Do you speak Norway?'” This girl seemed about five years old so I tried to think of an analogy in simple enough English that she could understand. I remembered one that someone else had made between caused beings and a chain of dominoes. Each domino requires the one before it to get it moving, but you need something that’s not a domino to get the whole chain started. In our world everything is like a domino. It requires a cause to get it going. Like the dominoes, everything in the world needs to be caused by something outside. This outside cause is God. He is the uncaused cause. With the little girl, I tried to present that argument as well as I could. I was able to see from her expressions that she was following along and hopefully able to receive it.
This was a great pastoral experience for me because it’s the sort of question everyone has. It’s a basic question that needs to be answered before moving on to deeper things. The priest, and also the one studying to become one, is in a special position to answer questions about who God is and it’s really a joy to be able to bring people into knowing Him. At any age and in every language, God is the ultimate answer to our questioning hearts for help and for meaning.
Thank you for your prayers and support for us seminarians as we begin our Spring semester.