“When Life Speaks to You”

 

“When Life Speaks to You”

Luke 21:29–33

 


My dear brothers and sisters,

We all understand what it means for someone to have never learned how to read. A person who is illiterate faces real limitations: they cannot defend themselves before a document, they miss important signs, and they depend on others even for the simplest things. In today’s world there are many new forms of illiteracy: technological illiteracy, when we cannot use essential tools; political illiteracy, when we do not understand how decisions are made over our lives; and emotional illiteracy, when we cannot interpret what we feel. But there is a deeper and more dangerous form of illiteracy than all of these: spiritual illiteracy.

 

Spiritual illiteracy is not simply not knowing how to pray or not having memorized Scripture. It is something far more serious: not knowing how to interpret life through God’s eyes. It is looking at the world without the light of the Gospel. It appears when we do not recognize God’s action in history, when we see problems but not God’s guidance or invitation. It appears when we confuse ideology with faith, clinging to political narratives that sound religious but contradict the Gospel. It appears when we fail to distinguish what is essential from what is secondary, when urgency devours what is truly important. It appears when we confuse emotions with the will of God, mistaking strong opinions for the Spirit or mistaking fear for a sign. It appears when we interpret life only from a human perspective, and when we do that, everything becomes dark, heavy, and hopeless.

 

In simple terms, spiritual illiteracy is the inability to read God’s voice in what is happening. And when a society loses its spiritual reading, it also loses its moral direction. This is why history has seen the rise of political models that looked attractive, or even “more Christian than the Church,” models that promised justice or equality but pushed Christ out of the center. And when people try to apply Gospel values without Christ, without truth, without dignity, and without freedom, the results are always the same: massive migrations, social collapse, extreme poverty, systematic persecution, families destroyed, and innocent lives lost. Many of the humanitarian crises that force entire nations to flee today were born from ideologies that promised paradise and delivered suffering. This is why we must return to Christ if we want to read the signs of history truthfully.

 

And this is where today’s Gospel speaks to us. Jesus says that just as we know summer is near when the trees begin to bud, we must learn to read the signs of God in our lives, in society, and in the events of our time. But if we are spiritually illiterate, we cannot read anything. We see events, but not the message; crisis, but not the invitation; injustice, but not the cry that God wants us to hear; violence, but not the call to conversion. Jesus does not ask us to predict the future. He asks us to wake up.

 

With humility I say this: I have seen how a Christian who cannot read reality spiritually ends up defending political positions that contradict the Gospel—positions that undermine human dignity, systems that create forced migration, social models that call evil “good” and good “evil,” proposals that pretend to help the poor but end up robbing them of hope. When we lose our spiritual reading, we lose our compass.

 

Life is always speaking. History is always speaking. God is always speaking. The question is not whether God communicates. The question is whether we know how to read Him. Today Jesus invites us to open our eyes, to learn to read the signs of the times, and to discover that the Kingdom of God is near, even today.

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