GRENADA
Bishop Clyde Harvey of St Georges-in-Grenada opined there are many people who believe in God but not a God who is faithful and who is ever sure, only a God who is demanding.
Addressing hundreds of Catholics gathered at a diocesan rally on Trinity Sunday at the La Sagesse playing field, the Bishop quoting from the Bible said that the Jews moved away from that kind of belief and began to believe in a God who is faithful, all-kindness and compassionate.
“…My first question to you today,” he said, “is do you really believe in a God who is all-tenderness, kindness and compassionate, whose mercy is overflowing? Do you believe in that kind of a God?”
“What kind of God do you want for your children? Many of us will want a God who will help us to control the children. What do you tell your children – if you do that God will punish you and some of us grow up with that,” Bishop Harvey said, according to online news source The New Today.
Bishop Harvey shared of grown men who said they stopped believing in God because they were told that God will punish them “for this and that and they ain’t get punished yet and they ain’t see no reason to believe in God.”
“What kind of God do you teach your children to honour, to believe in? Take that question seriously,” Bishop Harvey said.
According to the Bishop, even those persons who serve as catechists in their parishes and engaged in preparing children for First Communion and Confirmation, it is still a temptation “to put before them a God who keeps them in order.”
He reminded them: “What about the God who is faithful no matter what? Can we so educate our children in the faith that they are able to sing that song that some of you love so well but I wonder if you really entertain its meaning – ‘All my life you have been faithful, all my life you have been so good’.”
“Can you sing that, believe it and trust it because for all of us there will be times when you wonder about the faithfulness of your God and if anybody tells us that they never wondered, they never lived.”
“One of the things that I have learnt in my life is when you are tempted to believe that something is wrong – wait on the Lord, be patient. Wait on the Lord so that He will show you what is going on in your own life.”
Bishop Harvey reminded the congregation that Catholics believe in “a God who is ever faithful” and one “with mercy and compassion.”
The Bishop also used the occasion of the homily in the Mass that was attended by a number of leading government officials including Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell, to address the growing trend of persons wearing costumes to play mas that are considered too scanty and exposing too much of their body.
He warned that if “our morality is being tested … it is being tested because we ourselves are failing to proclaim justice and truth, and solid morality to people.”
“And if it is that some of our women and in some cases some of our men chose to dress indecently our task is not to cry them down; our task is to seek the opportunities to say a word to them, seek the opportunities to point things out to them.
“In this regard, I want to challenge every woman here don’t say to men to get the government to ban this, ban that, get the police to intervene. No, look for the sisters – when you hear your own daughters talking about going to play mas and talking about a costume that you know can’t fit in an envelope, talk to them.
“We must take responsibility for the relationships that we have before God. If you talk to your daughters, your sisters, to your goddaughters, nieces and in some instances to your nephews you may get somewhere with it. So that is a task as we go forth from this place,” Bishop Harvey said.
