In the Gospel account of the temptations of Christ one is struck by the devil’s offer of reward to the Lord provided the latter knelt down to adore him. Since the beginning of time, pride, of which Satan is the prime advocate, has always hounded man and has led him to believe that control over his life and even on nature as God has created is absolute.

A case in point is gender ideology and the stand taken by governments regarding same-sex relations. Genesis is very clear that God made them “male and female” and Jesus also says: “From the beginning of creation God has made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one.”

With the passing of legislation enabling same-sex marriage and putting it on a par with heterosexual marriage we have embarked on a path of open defiance of God as Creator. As Pope Francis says in Amoris Laetitia: “There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in anyway similar or even analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family” (251).

Man’s need to be in absolute control of his destiny and that of others sometimes comes to a woeful (and mysterious) end. The demise of the all-powerful Soviet Union is a case in point. No political analyst ever predicted that the communist regime in Russia and all over Eastern Europe would come to such an early and abrupt end. Yet, an invisible hand in the latter part of 1989 seemed to have decreed that ‘enough is enough’. Like a deck of cards, the Soviet Union and its satellites dissolved like snow in the sun.

Can our pride allow us to learn from all this that our control is not so absolute and permanent after all and that an all-loving God and Father is the final arbiter of our destiny?