How Long Will There Be So Much Evil?

On Saturday night I had a terrible nightmare. I dreamed I was weeping in despair at so much injustice and wickedness in our country. I saw people dying in the street. I saw lines of people fighting over food. I saw sick people suffering or dying because they couldn’t get their medicines or a hospital bed. I also dreamed about an advertisement for armored cars I had seen on television, which struck me as terrible: a woman in her SUV with her little girl and her baby, caught in the middle of a street protest, and the three of them smiling as if nothing were happening, because they were protected by their armored car. I don’t know which advertiser came up with such a dehumanizing ad.

So on Sunday I woke up with a great heaviness in my soul. When I sat down for a while of prayer, I found that among the readings for that day’s Mass was the dialogue between the prophet Habakkuk and God, in which he complains to the Lord about the triumph of evil. The resemblance between what is described there and what we are living now seemed incredible to me.

“How long, Lord, must I cry for help and you do not listen? Must I cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ and you do not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look upon trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and quarrels arise. So the law is weakened and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous, and so justice comes out twisted.”

Then God answers him with a vision in which he urges him to patience and hope, because the day will come when the wicked will be punished: “The vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens toward the end and will not fail. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come and will not delay. Whoever is not upright in soul will fall, but the righteous will live by faith.”

And then God pronounces terrible woes against the oppressor, beginning with the greedy: “Woe to him who heaps up what is not his own (how long?) and loads himself with pledges… Because you have plundered many nations, all who remain of the peoples will plunder you, for the human blood you shed and the violence done to lands, to cities and to all who live in them…” “Woe to him who seeks unjust gain for his house, to set his nest on high and escape the reach of disaster! You have devised shame for your house by destroying many peoples, and you have sinned against yourself…” “Woe to him who builds a city with blood and founds a town on crime!…” ”…What use is an idol that its maker has carved, a cast image that teaches lies, that its maker should trust in it when he makes mute idols?…”

And Habakkuk says to him: “Lord, I have heard your message. Lord, I stand in awe of your deeds. Renew them in our days, in our days make them known. In your wrath, remember mercy.”

Reading that passage gave me great peace, and I liked very much that Habakkuk asked for mercy for those people. Justice and Mercy are two words that are perfect when they go together.

Then I read the day’s Gospel, in which Jesus Christ says to his apostles: “If you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you… When you have done everything you were commanded, say: ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what we ought to have done.’”

Even if we see that evil may be winning, we cannot lose faith! And we have to keep doing what is ours to do, faithful to God’s commandments. I am sure that one day good will triumph over evil in our beloved homeland, and we will stop seeing so many people suffering and dying beside us. A month ago a friend’s brother was killed, and two weeks ago another friend’s son was shot and left paraplegic. There are thousands of stories like that, sins being committed in our country every day that cry out to heaven, the product of anarchy and a lack of values in broad sectors of society (from the lowest to the “highest”).

When the Berlin Wall fell, a journalist told John Paul II that he had been one of the people who made it happen. John Paul II answered: “I have only been an unworthy servant who did what he had to do.” So let us keep going with faith, asking the Lord to increase it in us more every day, never to let us lose hope, and to help us keep doing what He commands, above all keeping that first commandment that contains everything: “Love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself.”

Let us keep fighting with all our soul and praying with great faith for our country. Let each of us give the very most we can so that our homeland may walk along paths of Truth, Justice and Peace for all. God and the Blessed Virgin of Coromoto will help us.