The Anchoress
Esteban Rojas, the 18th miner rescued
We sit here in our living rooms and offices, sipping coffee and checking e-mails, and hour after hour, another one emerges, up a long dark hole, to a shaft of daylight, and there are cheers and tears — and then something more. Something that moves even the most hardened heart. The world is blinking back tears as we see it, again and again. One man, breathing his first fresh air in months, falls to his knees and prays. Another makes the sign of the cross. And in the media-saturated aftermath, one of the miners is interviewed on camera, still wearing his dark glasses, still numbed by it all, and he puts it in terms we can all understand. It sounds so simple — to some, I’m sure, simplistic — but it all makes perfect sense.
“I’ve been near God, but I’ve also been near the devil,” he says through a translator. “God won.”
Yes. That’s it. End of discussion.
You’ll want to read the whole thing.
I wish none of this had to happen. But if it did have to happen–if it needed to be–then I am grateful that it happened in a culturally Catholic country. With the press’ constantly negative, anti-Church drumbeat, the pop-culture’s depictions of Christians as hateful buffoons, and the lingering effects of Rome’s past sins ever before us, it almost seems like the Holy Spirit is using this event and these men to make a dynamic demonstration of the value of faith, the efficacy of grace and prayer and the obvious and less obvious ways by which light can overcome darkness.
What the world is glimpsing in these men who fall to their knees, cross themselves, or testify to God’s presence among them – in these woman holding rosaries to their chests as they wait, is the faith unfiltered and unspinnable; the Body of Christ, blessed, broken and then shared for the life of the world.
What was lost has been found; though the foundations may shake, even still the darkness does not prevail.
Bless the miners and their families, who are giving strong personal witness to the fact that no pit is so deep that Christ is not deeper, still. And that human life is precious, no matter where it is, and no matter how difficult it may be to preserve.
Pat Gohn looks at the Liturgical Calendar and goes, “hmmmmm….”
UPDATE:
After reading this astounding nonsense from Chris Matthews, allow me to indulge in an over-the-top eyeroll!
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