A little while back a package arrived in the mail which contained a small surprise…
Actually, the surprising thing wasn’t so much the contents of the package (you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that appears on my doorstep), but the fact that I hadn’t ordered them myself. They just kind of showed up out of nowhere. And because of that, I couldn’t help but immediately think of this…
Pretty easy to spot the connection, huh? I’ve always loved Invisible Hands. Back when the folks at MTV only spent about 80% of their time being a corrosive influence on the culture of the world rather than making it a full time pursuit like they do these days, you could still run across the occasional worthwhile program such as Liquid Television, an animated series showcasing the works of various artists whose works were a bit off the beaten track. Invisible Hands, a loose adaptation of Richard Sala’s comic book Thirteen O’Clock, was one of my favorites, capturing as it did both the language of noir and the lunacy of giallo. The whole thing’s only about 10 minutes long, so here’s the entire serial if you’re interested…
EPISODE 1, EPISODE 2, EPISODE 3, EPISODE 4, EPISODE 5, EPISODE 6
Now, not to worry, the eyeballs which mysteriously appeared in my mailbox turned out not to be connected to a cult of one handed assassins in any way, but rather were part of an advertising campaign for a computer repair and data retrieval company (which, now that I think about it, is almost just as weird). So, I’m relatively safe as far as that goes, unless there’s some other reason a cult of one handed assassins might take an interest in me that I’m not thinking of (maybe the Free Will Baptists are still ticked off I joined the Catholic Church).
But just like any other time some odd little thing like this happens to me (more times than you might suspect), it did make me think. Just because no masked killers were involved, that didn’t necessarily mean there was no hidden message for me. After all, just how often do you receive a pair of eyes in the mail? Has to mean something, right? Well, within a few minutes of opening up the package, the thought that popped into my head was the number of verses in Psalms which reminds us that “The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths but speak not; they have eyes but see not; They have ears but hear not; no breath is in their mouths. Their makers shall be like them, all who trust in them.”
Well, I had definitely been given a pair of eyes. Was there something I wasn’t seeing? The Catechism warns us that “It is important for every person to be sufficiently present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience. This requirement of interiority is all the more necessary as life often distracts us from any reflection, self-examination or introspection.” So maybe my special delivery was telling me it was time for a quick “examination of conscience made in the light of the Word of God. The passages best suited to this can be found in the Ten Commandments, the moral catechesis of the Gospels and the apostolic Letters, such as the Sermon on the Mount and the apostolic teachings.” That’s a whole lot of reading, so it’s fortunate I was able to find plenty of websites out there with good premade lists of questions for conducting an examination of conscience. (Catholic-Pages.com has a pretty decent one to get started with.) Perhaps I was reading too much into an advertising stunt, but hey, better to be safe than eternally sorry, right?
Now, what to do if a jewel encrusted hand shows up tomorrow…
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