Putting everything together for school takes a lot of physical time and all the mental and emotional energy I have. It leaves little for putting words onto the page. Yet, the goal of a writer is to put down words, every day. No chances, no excuses. The habit itself, will help the words come.
So I’m here at the keyboard trying to coax thoughts out of my head. They are not coming. Instead, what floods my head, are fears.
We live in a time I cannot understand. When people cheer the rounding up of the homeless, the separating of families, the ignoring of the rule of law, and the promise of endless tighter restrictions on dissent, it is the very opposite of Christ’s call to each of our hearts. I know it happens on the macro scale, but on the micro as well. We get petty, angry, frustrated easily. That irritation in turn invites us to justify responding the same way.
The world gets more wounded as a consequence. Saint Therese of Lisieux understood, and so responded to the temptation to be small, by doubling down on being humble. She served those who irritated her with such grace that they did not know they tried her heart.
We need to double down on grace, on hope, on peace, and when we fail –as we will, we must run to Christ.
Seek forgiveness, ask God to mold the heart into one like His.
It is the only way we can be part of the kingdom of God.
Christ will not take us if we will not take His heart as ours first. Christ will offer us His heart, from the moment of conception to the moment of our death, courting us with beauty, with gifts, with graces, with friends, with answered prayers, with sacraments, with everything we allow. However, we have to lean into the offer, and seek to imitate Him in all things.
It is not easy.
And again, we will often fail. How do we respond to injustice –we must speak up against it, and we must also, pray for the individuals who wrong us. Serve them as Saint Theresa served. Christ served even those who would deny and who would desert, and those who would betray Him. We must do likewise. Our path to sainthood, is all the steps we must take away from sin, each of them, all of them.
Pope Leo asked for us to pray today for peace, real peace, the kind that comes from willing the good of the others, and not demanding a price for that good will. That sort of peace and grace only comes through prayer, fasting, and the hard work of not succumbing to the easy dark pleasure of small thinking, small words, and small of heart acts. We must be as full of grace as possible, and act more just than the world’s behavior suggests we should.
To the world, this sort of response looks weak. It is the hardest thing to do, to not want to respond to hate with hate, rage with rage, violence with violence, and despair with despair. The fallen part of us wants to win here, to triumph over, to have the last word.
God tells us, the victory has already been won, and not by us, that we are to serve, not lord over, and that Christ is the word –which means first and foremost, we’re not.
If you didn’t get to the fasting or prayer today, not to worry.
There’s a whole tomorrow to tackle this, and no prayer, sacrifice, fasting, or service, gift or kindness is ever missed by our Lord. They all count.
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