Bishop Hoover

Dear Co-laborers with Christ,

As I write this message on Monday in Holy Week, snow is falling outside my study window. This year, the turn of the season seems characterized primarily by winter's refusal to let go. Although the Lower Susquehanna Valley has repeatedly dodged the most severe snowstorms this year, there is still the longing on the part of many for spring to come. Punxsutawney Phil's empty promise of an early spring seems a betrayal now, and for all the ambiguous predictions of the wooly bears and the Farmer's Almanac, we are reminded that the weather will do what it will do, and there's no doing anything about it.

The need to control, or at least predict, the future seems to be a part of human nature. Exponential expansion of technology contributes to this view of human power, increasingly making us lords over our environment. And indeed, we have accomplished much for the sake of the common good. As the future broke over the last generation, our quality of life became better and better, in ways previously unimaginable. But for all our ingenuity, there are areas of life that seem beyond our control: the weather, to be sure, but also human cruelty and death. We kill one another at an alarming rate, with firearms, to be sure, but finally any way we can. And, if we survive one another, the curtain of mortality finally closes on our little lives. It is a reality we cannot control. We are all terminal cases. Read more...

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