on another note, i hope you are all well. home, and moreso my friends and family from home, have been weighing in on my thoughts to no small degree. it will be still another year before i return, but i am learning to pray better for you, learning bits of what it means to be "priest" for you in this time where i feel lack. please keep us here in your prayers as we finish the last month of classes, begin finals in June, and begin our summer apostolates. it is a somewhat busy time here and i am particularly worn and stressed. pray for humility, pray for trust. thank you. it will take a few minutes to read, but this meditation was encouraging to me and i hope it aids you too.
distantly,
matt libra
Christ's call to be Corageous by Fr. Servais Pinkaers OP (+April 2008)
It takes courage simply to believe, and to go on believing, in a world that accepts only material, tangible, purely human values, and that has become allergic to the spiritual and supernatural. To make the leap of faith, to throw oneself somehow wholly into the Word of the Lord, is the greatest risk and takes the greatest courage possible. It is no easier today than it was in former times. As Kierkegaard wrote, "the highest passion in man is faith, and no generation begins where the preceding one left off; each generation starts all over again." It is an adventure like no other, to plunge into the mystery of faith, into the desert of interior solitude where only God sees us, and where he draws us in order to speak with us, when so many human voices deafen our ears, trying to hold us back.
It takes courage to build one's life on the unknown territory of God and to put one's hope in "things above, where the Risen Christ is seated," when so many interests, values, tasks, and needs compete for our attention here below. It takes real audacity and even a touch of madness, that we see in those who bury themselves in cloisters for their whole lives and who dare to look useless for Christ's sake in a world that values only the productive.
It takes courage to articulate to others the truth of the faith that enlightens us, to profess the Credo which has been confided to us and to transmit it, whatever the divergent opinions raised up around us. Does it not take courage even to talk about the Lord in our daily conversations?
It takes courage to meet the small needs of every day, to carry out our simple and monotonous work, in a spirit of faith, and to be naive enough to believe that the light of the Lord penetrates even there, just as the light of the sun shines in our kitchen, our office.
It takes courage to carry on firmly and to persevere when storms arise and shake us up interiorly and exteriorly, when fidelity is shattered by the very ones who were constituted its guardians, and God seems to be silent, to the point where we perceive that the courage that remains to us unaccountably comes from his hand, discreetly sustaining us and preparing, in the midst of our trial, the flash of a new light.
