Spiritual lukewarmness turns our lives into a graveyard.

False inner peace bears no fruit, so we must ask the Lord for the grace of conversion today, not tomorrow. This challenging text sees the Lord, through the prophet, urging people to reflect on their behaviour, decide to change it, and rebuild God’s ruined house.

A lazy people who do not trust in the Lord’s help

The prophet Haggai sought to inspire a people who were apathetic and had succumbed to bitterness and a defeatist mentality. For years, the people had done nothing to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, which their enemies had destroyed, so the Lord sent his chosen one to rebuild the Temple. However, the people still did not have the will to get up and start again; they did not allow themselves to be helped by the Lord, who wanted to lift them. And this is the drama of these people, and ours too, when a spirit of lukewarmness overcomes us, when this lukewarmness of life comes, when we say: Well, yes, Lord, okay… but slowly, slowly, Lord, that would be enough… I’ll do it tomorrow! So that we can say the same thing tomorrow, and tomorrow will postpone it until the day after tomorrow, and so on… And the result is a life of delaying the decision to convert our hearts, to change our lives…

Spiritual lukewarmness is “cemetery peace”

Spiritual lukewarmness hides behind uncertainties, and many people’s lives end up in tatters because they did nothing but maintain peace for themselves. This is ‘cemetery peace’. When we embrace this attitude of spiritual lukewarmness, we turn our lives into a cemetery; that is not life. It is simply a way of closing ourselves off so that problems do not affect us. Like those people who said: ‘Yes, we are in ruins, but let’s not take any risks; let’s not rock the boat.’ We are used to living like this..

Waking up from “gentle spiritual anaesthesia”

Something like this can happen to us, too. For example, when we keep putting off until tomorrow decisions about the little things that are not right and that the Lord wants us to change. Let us ask the Lord to help us “wake up from the spirit of lukewarmness,” to fight against this gentle anaesthesia of spiritual life. Let us ask the Lord for the grace not to fall into this spirit of “half-hearted Christians” or, as old women say, “Christians like rose water,” that is, without substance—Christians who are good, with much work, but “sow much and reap little.” Lives that were very promising but ultimately brought nothing.