The One Thing Necessary

The greatest moment of our lives, and usually the one we are least prepared for, is the one in which, upon leaving this world and entering the next, we will find ourselves face-to-face before God. In a real sense, we will judge ourselves in the presence of His pure goodness, love, beauty, light and truth. And we will immediately know where we belong.

Our judgment will occur in the context of two realities Jesus points to in the Gospel: how we have loved (I was hungry...) and how we have used the gifts God has given us. (Have we buried or hidden them under a bushel basket or used them to help build the Kingdom?) In the end, at this one definitive moment, that's what will matter.

So how can we prepare in order that this moment be for us one of utter joy and anticipation? Enter the deepest purpose of Catholic education which begins first and foremost in the home with the parents as the primary educators of their own children. The ultimate goal of all Catholic education, whether in the home, school, Church, or out in the world, is to prepare us to one day, see God face-to-face, having helped us to recognize and fulfill our own personal destiny in God’s great plan for mankind!

Even the most mundane subjects are meant, ultimately, to serve this goal, for everything that exists and that we interact with here has its own connection to God and either reveals something about Him directly or something about what He has created and why. In my early teaching years, the children, because they were in an environment which encouraged it, continually and spontaneously made these connections in music class, math class, science studies, geography, etc. It didn’t matter. They quite easily saw: “Middle C is just like Jesus. He’s the center to everything!” Or, “no matter what you are doing, God the Father looks into your heart to see if His Son is there!”

The development of Catholic education, which in a real sense began in the monasteries,
gives us a fundamental key to understanding the direction Catholic education should have today. For the monks, the essentials were always the same: "the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus"...(Phil 3:8), in light of which all else is rubbish.

The establishment of monastic communities was therefore ordered to a life that was conducive to the finding of God and to living out a covenantal relationship with Him. The biblical principles by which the monks lived and their deep study and contemplation of the mysteries of God in creation, started to leaven the chaos around them, so that time, learning, art, science, music, animal husbandry, farming, care of the poor, all began to be marked by the laws and light which God Himself had put into creation. An order and a fruitfulness developed that actually had heavenly origins. The bells announcing the call to prayer, which punctuated each day, and the liturgical seasons with their abundance of solemnities, feasts, and even the rich Gospel lessons of ordinary time, made the meaning of life, one's responsibilities, one's destiny, readily understood. It is important to note that Monasticism did not begin as an attempt to create a new culture or civilization. The holy men and women of early times were interested in the one thing necessary. The impact upon the surrounding environs was quite in accord with the words of Christ: "Seek first the kingdom (of God) and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides." (Mt 6:33)

The Christ-life within is still the essential thing in the midst of the contemporary bombardment of the inessential and our own growing barbarism. With authentic education, children begin to become (not in a forced way, but in a supernaturally natural development), little Christs touching the world in the activities of their childhood and adolescence. In adulthood, as they grow into the full measure of the mature Christ, they are meant to move into all the realms of human activity: intellectual, physical, scientific, academic, artistic, apostolic, spiritual, etc. and to be, even greater leaven as they take their places in the world.

Pope St. John Paul II often pointed out that the Church and the world are at a crossroads. Catholic education must respond to this challenge with new vigor. When it stays true to itself, it is the key to the formation of the new man, a new humanity and a new Pentecost, for, we know, "a Christian has only to be, in order to change the world." -C. Dawson, Christianity and the New Age.

Sr. Anne Marie Walsh, SOLT Jan 14, 2019

God's Dream

In the beginning, before light split the darkness for the first time and the waters were gathered into life-giving bodies, before the winds were purposefully directed and the stars and planets assigned their places, before any vegetation or land formation or animals were considered in the mind of God, we were His dream. The Father’s dream of a shared life with us, shattered in the Garden, awaited a new fullness of time. When the acceptable time came, “when peaceful stillness encompassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent, God’s all-powerful Word leapt from heaven’s royal throne into the doomed land” and the darkness of our hearts-Wisdom 18:15-17.

At the first Christmas, the whole world is in movement. Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem to be counted in the census. They journey, at the same time, toward the moment in which God, in the Person of Jesus, will enter the world through the womb of Mary, to live out His dream of a shared life of communion and intimacy with us. 

The Father knows the price He will pay for His dream. Mary, in Her mother’s heart and her knowledge of the Scriptures, knows it too. Her Son, Who shall be called the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the Most High, will also be known as the Suffering Servant who will give his life up as a ransom for the many. 

God enters our world in the fullness of time because He can no longer wait to be with us in Person. But Christmas also comes because mankind, in the persons of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men, seek God as well; because the intense, hidden longing of their souls has not been misinterpreted to them by the false prophets of the world. Their interior has not been cluttered with distraction. It is unfettered by illusion. God is their inner life and moves them in a mutual, eager longing, in silence, in poverty, in simplicity, in penetrating light and redeeming love so that His dream and our own everlasting happiness can be realized.
In every age, in the life of every person, this same movement is recapitulated. Christmas reminds us of this in a special way. For we too are moving on a journey through this life, in company with millions of others, to our own definitive encounter with God, a God Who has beckoned us to the deepest friendship and Who offers the gift of eternal joy to us by coming into the night of our world, our hearts, our souls, in the trappings of our own poverty, helplessness and littleness.

Mary and Joseph “walk the way of perfection” to Bethlehem because they know God and they understand, in the hidden depths of their hearts, the dream He has for all mankind. They call us to follow this way with them, a way which holds difficulty, discomfort, the contempt of the world, but which brings us also to be the friends of God, as the psalmist says: “He who walks the way of perfection shall be my friend.” -Ps 101

On Christmas night, Angel voices will beckon us to follow them to the stable where Eternal Love pierces through the veil of separation to reclaim His children, those starved for light and battered by the darkness of sin. As a tiny babe He comes. He comes to feed the hollow faces of the hopeless with joy, and surface the hidden grief that devours in silence, in order to heal in love.

In Bethlehem, two longings meet and answer each other: the longing of God and the longing of man. May this Christmas find us fulfilling the dream of God’s own heart in the lowly stable of our own souls. May He find in us the warmth and love and union that has been His dream from before time began.

Sr. AMW/SOLT

Dec. 6, 2018

Principalities and Powers

Our life in time is pretty simple to understand. We live in the midst of a war which God in His mercy doesn’t let us see completely. Were we to see some of what goes on in the invisible realms we would probably die of fright. Yet, the battle, between good and evil is a part of our daily existence.
“For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day, having done everything, to hold your ground." Eph 6: 12-13
In the wake of the current crisis in the Church, there are two questions each of us must ask.

1. How does God want me to respond to this?
2. How does the devil want me to respond to this?

We can easily and correctly surmise that the devil wants us to become destructively enraged, fall into discouragement, rash judgment, accusation, despair, and justify ourselves into leaving the Church altogether. But, we can also look to Jesus to see how He responded.
Jesus chose 12 Apostles, men specially selected by Him for the specific work of establishing the Church which He promised us would endure even though all hell come up against it. One of those men betrayed Jesus for a lousy sum of silver. Jesus called him friend even then, in one last effort to reclaim him.
Another, the future head of the infant Church, denied him 3 times. Jesus gave him the opportunity to recant by professing his love 3 times.
All the rest abandoned Him in his greatest need, out of fear. One only returned to the Cross because Our Lady gave him the courage to accompany her there. Jesus appeared to them all after rising from the dead, spoke peace to them, and after banishing their fear, prepared them to become mighty instruments in the hands of the Holy Spirit.

At the same time, Jesus does not go lightly on those who violate the innocence of children or remain obstinate in grave sin. “Better for them had they never been born.” But it doesn’t leave us off the hook either.
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

The weapons of warfare against the evil in the heart of man have been laid out for us by Jesus in the Gospel: prayer, fasting (which the Fathers of the Church considered a form of exorcism), vigilance, self-denial and humility, humility, humility. Mary sends the devils fleeing in terror precisely for this reason. Her profound humility drew heaven to earth! It is the greatest power against the ugly pride that infects us all, a pride that is the gateway to so many other sins.
St. Ignatius picks up these themes in his classic meditation on The Two Standards. We are either in one camp or the other, the Lord’s or satan’s. It is necessary for us to know what ground we stand on. Because in the end, holiness, communion with Christ, is the only thing that transforms the human heart and changes the world.

As the devil told St. John Vianney, “If there were three such priests as you, my kingdom would be ruined. ...” That holiness, which should be the aspiration of every priest, is, at the same time, required of each of us as well. Our holiness as a people who come to live with and in and through Christ, will then be the driving force behind the victories of the Kingdom of Light over the Kingdom of darkness in this present age. And that holiness will mark the glory of the world that is to come.

Sr. Anne Marie Walsh SOLT 11/4/2018