St. Paul and Covairs have something in common and can teach us a lot about the spiritual life.
Last week, I stopped to see my folks and I noticed a "new" car parked in our driveway. My dad had just purchased a 1965 Covair. Last month I finished a book entitled, Engines of Change, which tells the story of a handful of vehicles that impacted American culture in a dramatic way from the Model T to the Toyota Prius. The author made the bold claim that the Covair has had the most influential impact on American culture. Why? Well, the Covair was GM's response to the VW Beetle made by a post WW II German Car company. The Covair, as did the Beetle, contained a rear-mounted engine. Unfortunately, the Covair's problem was instability. Because there was too much weight in the back, the car had the propensity of running off the road very easily, especially around corners. Long story short, Ralph Nader began a consumer crusade to sue the pants off of GM and wrote a book entitled, "Unsafe at Any Speed." Thus the modern litigious movement in the United States. Soon, people were suing McDonald's for making their coffee too hot. Today, you can't talk to someone if there is a potential conflict without contacting a lawyer, or even buy a property without some type of lawyer to draft some type of legal document up for you. Insurance is wed to a litigious society and one wonders just how long we will be able to do youth ministry! Our expedition registration form alone has four pages of litigious verbiage.
However, is the era of litigation anything new? Nope. Listen to St. Paul in today's first reading, "Can it be that there is not one among you wise enough to be able to settle a case between brothers? But rather brother goes to court against brother, and that before unbelievers? Now indeed then it is, in any case, a failure on your part that you have lawsuits against one another. Why not rather put up with injustice? Would you not rather let yourselves be cheated?" (I Cor 6)
This is the holy indifference the Lord calls us to! We don't belong to this world. We are in the world but not of the world. I am not making a claim that law has no place in society by any means. Law is important in defending the innocent and protecting our God-given rights in a just society. Unfortunately, the letter of litigious law overrules the letter of God's love so very often in our lives. We see the letter of this worldly law as superior to God's law of love. It would be good for us to remember that perspective puts God's love in the driver's seat and rule of law in the passenger seat. In the meantime, I will thank God for Covairs, St. Paul and God's letter of love, but I won't get in my Dad's Covair.
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