Giving Up Secrets

People seem to have a lot of secrets these days. We could almost say we live in an age of secrets. Governments have become skilled at keeping secrets; businesses are adept at the same thing. Institutions, whether they be educational, medical or religious, all keep secrets for both good reasons and not so good reasons. But this reflects people in general. People tend to keep a lot of secrets.

There is a pressing need to recognize that secrets make a difference. They can determine the direction of our lives, and the manner in which we pass from this world into the next. For whatever reason, people today seem to have more secrets than ever. They have secret activities, secret wounds, secret weaknesses, secret sins, secret fantasies, secret lives. People have secret thoughts, secret addictions, secret jealousies, secret plans, secret ambitions, family secrets, secret judgments, secret desires…secrets without number, secrets we keep even from ourselves.

Few of us can admit to being ready for heaven when we consider that in heaven, our insides will show on the outside. Nothing will be hidden. Everything will be transparent. Transparency here would completely change our image. And because we are often not willing to change, we keep secrets.

At the same time, even though we hide things about ourselves, we have a certain affinity for, or attraction to the secrets of others. There is almost nothing people like better than hearing a good secret. Why? There are several reasons. One, it diverts attention away from our own secrets. But we also love secrets because we love hidden knowledge. We live in a state of being that is still looking for something that hasn’t been completely revealed to us yet. We’re searching, whether we know it or not, for the one Word, so to speak, that will answer all of our questions and give sight to the vision, the understanding we seek.

The devil knows this about us. Would that people understood that the devil has to penetrate the world of knowledge by study and observation too (albeit with a superior intelligence,) and that he perverts what he knows to his own ends. Those ends are not full of happy consequences for human souls.

He is interested in luring people away from the real light. He does it with promises of hidden knowledge, just as he did in the Garden of Eden. (This is also one of the most lucrative marketing techniques around. Money rolls in when you claim to have the secret to long life, to health, to beauty, to happiness, to success. This is also one of the reasons professional gossips, psychics and clairvoyants prosper in our culture today. People want to know those secrets.)

We on the other hand, have the source of all knowledge, the fount of pure Wisdom and Light in God Himself. And we have been given, in Jesus Christ, and through His Church, a direct line to that source, Who is for us, our true Father (the Father of all lights). The temptations of some dark meddler should never cause us to turn our glance away from our Good Father, as our first parents did in the Garden, and as we so often do in our own lives.

Interestingly enough, Jesus mentions that the Father Himself keeps secrets from the “wise and learned” and reveals things to the “little ones.” Why is that? (This might have been a good question for Adam and Eve to have asked as they were being tempted to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.) We know most certainly that God never does anything without good reason, and a reason that redounds, often in mysterious ways, to our greatest benefit.

Might it be that God protects the sacred and hides divine treasures for our sake? Anyone who has studied covenant knows that profaning the sacred is dangerous. We can be destroyed by our profanation. A simple look at the human wreckage surrounding the modern desecration of the gift and mystery of sexuality confirms this.

In other words, could it be that just as Jesus told us not to cast pearls before swine, He follows His own counsel with us? He puts His treasure in safe places…He is careful with what is precious beyond measure. And at the same time He is merciful to those of us who would have a terrible accounting to give for squandering a poorly understood gift, if we received it and did not really appreciate or care for it.

Secrets like this can be a good thing; in fact they can be a very good thing if their purpose is to protect a treasure (whether that be jewels or a reputation) from vandalism or theft, misuse or destruction.

But some secrets should never be kept. And unfortunately, people usually have more of these kinds of secrets.

We pay a price for many of the secrets we keep. We can safely say, I think, that many of the sicknesses of our age are determined by the secrets we keep. This is well known in the world of addiction and co-dependency: “We are only as sick as our secrets.” This is actually a psychology that was first explicated in the Sacred Scriptures. Psalm 32 says: “I kept it secret and my frame was wasted…” The distress, the groaning, the anxiety, the depression, the disturbance of so many today more often than not comes from holding secrets that should not be kept.

St. Paul mentions this relationship between spiritual realities and physical consequences. He says, in 1Corinthians, 11:29: “For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep.” With the rising tide of illnesses in our age, we await a physician who will make this connection and diagnose the real cause of so many of the physical and psychological disorders of our day.

I know a woman who struggled with terrible depression much of her adult life, watched Mother Angelica faithfully, but would not take the secret of her abortion to the Confessional. She died recently and my prayer is that before she died she finally released her secret into the loving mercy of God so she could enter her heavenly home with “joy and an upright heart.” Her secret certainly didn’t keep her in peace or bring happiness into her life. In fact, it brought her to the verge of a mental breakdown.

So why do we keep the secrets we do? This is a mystery really, since we only fool ourselves in keeping these kinds of secrets. God is certainly not fooled. There is nothing He doesn’t know about us. The story of Ananias and Sapphira, found in the fifth chapter of Acts, tells us exactly what can happen when we dissemble before God. They pretended (to the Lord, as St. Peter points out) that they were giving everything to the community of believers, when in fact they retained a portion for themselves which they could have rightfully retained if they had chosen to. After St. Peter had spoken, Ananias, and later his wife Sapphira (who arrived late and was questioned separately) both died on the spot, apparently for attempting to deceive God.

Keeping secrets from God is impossible, and it can be deadly! If not immediately, then at our own judgments, when in our encounter with God Who is pure Love and Light and Goodness, all that is hidden will be revealed. To our own overwhelming confusion we will find ourselves suddenly naked before the Lord, rather than clothed in the garments of grace He so freely and continually offers us, all because fear, or attachment or pride kept us from giving up our secrets.

Does this mean we should blurt out everything to everyone all the time, like they do on the tacky talk shows that seem to pollute the air waves? No. There is something inherently debasing about psychologically disrobing in front of millions of people. There is something degrading about vomiting up things in public that properly belong in a counselor’s office and more often in a Confessional where the justification, relief and redemption that people are really seeking can be given.

This is really how Saints actually begin to become Saints. They get rid of their secrets. And they don’t lie to themselves about who they really are. That is why they are such shining examples of humility. They know themselves in Truth, and it sets them free to soar to the heights! They give their secrets, both their sins and their treasures, over to God. He takes the sins, and in Confession completely annihilates them, wills to remember them no more. They are gone, gone, gone, with no more power to determine their life, and will never again reappear in accusation against them, even at the end of time. Never!

And then our Father does an even more astounding thing. He begins giving them “treasures out of the darkness and riches that have been hidden away.” Isaiah 45:3 He takes miserable secrets and begins to replace them with the secrets He holds. What an exchange! The saints are no fools! They know this bargain is unmatched anywhere in the whole universe. In the heart of our Redeemer, we are given, by way of His own sacrificial love, infinite riches in exchange for giving to Him our sinfulness, our pride, our imperfections, our self-importance.

Great Confessors, like St. John Vianney and St. Padre Pio spent themselves in this work of getting people to give up their secrets so that they could begin to know the deep things of God in their lives. There is a reason the sacrament of Peace and Reconciliation is an Easter Sacrament. There is a reason that the Holy Spirit, Who comes in Pentecost like a mighty wind to sweep out the secret and dark recesses of our souls and fill them with fire and light, is the culminating gift of the Easter season.

Our Blessed Mother, the most pure creature who ever lived, was without secrets of her own. She kept only those God gave her. And because of that, there is no one more beautiful, more radiantly transparent in the living of the Mysteries of the Most Holy Trinity. In Her many apparitions in the last centuries, we can hear the cry of our good Mother when she bids us return to the Sacraments and live the Gospel way of life. One of the things She is saying with great affection and urgency, as if speaking to a little child, is: “Run! Run and whisper your secrets to your Father. All of them! And be assured that He will give treasures out of the darkness and riches that have been hidden away especially for you!”

Sr. Anne Marie Walsh, SOLT
General Sister Servant
5/6/2013

Of Billboards, Prophecy and Resurrection.

Driving into Corpus Christi on Interstate 37 one now notices a rather curious sign. It reads: “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.”

It’s obviously a very public posting with a specific intent. But there is room to wonder whether it actually conveys more than was intended. As a believer, reading between the lines, I read it another way. I read: “Don’t believe in God? The truth is you’re not alone. He is with us!”

It reminds me of two stories, one from Scripture and one from the life of a canonized Saint. The passage from Scripture has to do with Caiaphas, the high priest involved in the orchestration of Jesus’ execution. He unwittingly prophesied the real significance of Jesus’ death.

As the Sanhedrin met, the argument went like this: “What are we going to do? If we leave him (Jesus) alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation.” (In other words, bad things will happen if too many people come to believe in Jesus!)

“But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing, nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish.” He did not say this on his own, but since he was high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God. So from that day on, they planned to kill him.” John 11: 47-53

There is no doubt that western society has adopted a militant spirit against believers. But not all believers. God forgive us but we are not bothered by believers in abortion, believers in freedom to pursue every type of perversity, believers in satanism (a creed that has definite destructive and malicious intent), believers in almost any kind of religion, even violent ones. We are not bothered by believers in systems or ideologies that consistently degrade or offend against human dignity. But we are “bothered” by believers in Jesus Christ! We are bothered by His effect on people, His power to persuade people, to influence them, to change their lives.

The argument is that bad things happen when too many people believe in God. Our civilization is held back and the glory of man in all his capacity for achievement is retarded. Isn’t that the common position of those who oppose organized religion? Ignorance and religion are equated and held to be responsible for man’s lack of development.

We somehow conveniently forget that our rebellion in the garden changed everything. We are the ones who changed paradise and opened the door to death and suffering and corruption. Jesus comes to rescue us and instead we blame Him and the Church He established, for our woes.

It can easily be argued that we live in a world that is still trying to kill God, and which justifies this by assigning the prevalence of tragedy to believers. From the beginning of time, this dynamic has been so pervasive we should really recognize it more quickly than we do. Religion, but especially the Judeo-Christian tradition, must be done away with because it is the cause of all the wars, evil, ignorance and injustice found in the world today. The cause is not the corruption in the heart of man, but belief in God! And not the Greek kind of God who sits on top of Mt. Olympus randomly throwing bolts of lightning at his unsuspecting subjects. But a God Who is Father to us, Who is full of mercy, goodness, kindness, Who has made everything for our delight and betterment, and Who loves us with such a crazy love that He has even been willing to die for us. This is the kind of God that we work with might and main to stay away from.

What’s even crazier is that we tried to definitively destroy Him once. But then He rose, conquering death and all evil in the process and claiming for us an inheritance that utterly transcends anything the Romans can ever take away from us. And what is our reaction? The same as the reaction of the Pharisees to Lazarus. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and because so many people came to believe as a result, the furious response of the Pharisees was: “Let’s kill him again!”

Somehow we become bent on destroying the eternal. Because the eternal intrudes upon our immediate plans. Why we are so interested in preserving our “mess of pottage” over the infinite treasures promised us is one of the strange ironies of our fallen nature. And yet in our attempts to deny and destroy the existence of God’s real presence among us, we testify to it at the same time.

The Billboard also reminded me of a story that comes from the life of Padre Pio. St. Pio was a stigmatist who lived in the last century and was renowned for his life of holiness and for the countless souls he touched in the confessional, as well as through other miraculous interventions. He had numerous mystical gifts which are all well documented in an age where there was plenty of science to test them.

One day he was approached by a penitent who questioned the very existence of hell. Padre Pio’s matter–of–fact answer: “You’ll believe it when you get there.” The lesson? Our opinions don’t change the truth. Even if millions of others hold the same opinion. We can dance around the truth. We can deny it. But we can’t change it or destroy it. Because the Truth is unchangeable and indestructible. Just as Jesus, Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life is indestructible, and is the same yesterday, today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8). We tried to destroy Him once. But He simply rose. We keep trying. But it is futile. We cannot destroy the eternal.

From the beginning of time we have had a basic choice: submission to the Truth, or rebellion. Submission leads to life, to allowing God to love us… which is all He really wants to do. Rebellion eventually culminates in our trying to kill God once again but leads only to our own eternal death.

Do atheists have legitimate questions? Of course. Do believers have legitimate questions? Certainly. But as Pope Benedict said: “Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief, will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief…”

It is good to remember that for believers, the path to Resurrection goes through persecution and death. In the divine economy, Jesus makes persecution one of the beatitudes. As Fr. John Hardon, S.J. writes, the beatitudes are “promises of happiness made by Christ to those who faithfully accept His teaching and follow His divine example.” The pattern of Jesus’s redemptive work passes by the Way of the Cross. So too will our age be redeemed in the same way.

As we celebrate with special fervor during this year of Faith, amidst the disbelieving “signs” of our times, and solicitous for the salvation of all our brothers and sisters, our hearts catch the new fire of the Easter light that pierces the darkness of doubt hanging over the world in which we live. Jesus has triumphed in Resurrection, in glory and majesty; and within the embrace of Our Blessed Mother, whose singular faith during the Paschal Mystery emboldens us, we hold His light for the world to see until He comes again in glory! Alleluia! He lives no more to die, but lives that all may have eternal life!

In the Heart of Our Blessed Mother,
Sr. Anne Marie

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A Word Regarding the Real War on Women

By Sister Anne Marie Walsh, SOLT
November 7, 2012

PBS recently aired a documentary on women in 6 different countries called, “Half the Sky,” based on the book of the same name, by Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn.

Countries featured in the documentary were: Sierra Leone, where rape as a weapon of choice during the civil war there has now become mainstream; Cambodia, where sex-trafficking brothels are filled with younger and younger girls who are locked up and even caged, made to take “clients” non-stop; Vietnam, where girls, especially from the countryside, are discriminated out of educations and left with little hope for much of a future; Somaliland, where genital mutilation still goes on, causing chronic pain and complications, and where a huge percentage of women die in child birth because of these complications and the lack of medical care; India, where the caste system and dire poverty still creates a conducive environment for parents to sell their young girls into brothels, traumatizing them for life, and where generational prostitution is an entrenched way of life for many women; Kenya, where violence against women is so prevalent that women have begun initiatives of education and microfinance to begin to bring change to their situations.

And then there’s China, which wasn’t mentioned, with its one-child policy that has resulted in forced abortions, sterilizations, infanticide (of girls) and a huge gender imbalance which creates fertile ground for human trafficking.

There’s another country where women have been victimized by a powerful propaganda that has brought them to be ashamed of their bodies and the meaning of their bodies. Because of this propaganda, they have sterilized themselves in great numbers and had 50 million of their babies killed in the last 40 years.

All this has been done under a euphemism called “women’s reproductive health.” How it is exactly that women’s healthcare becomes synonymous with ending newly conceived life and disabling reproductive capacity, is the unasked question. But the underlying falsehood is that women can’t be equal to men unless they are able to abort their offspring and contracept themselves.

This country of course is the United States of America; and many countries in the West now promote this propaganda. The hidden lie is that women cannot have control of their destiny unless they can get rid of actually what makes them women. So they must have free access to abortion, contraception and sterilization.

People say this is a non-issue in our society and culture, that there is no real war against women in this country. Yet, if we don’t get this fundamental question right, everything else is skewed. The question of how we understand woman is a question of primary importance because it affects one half of our population and how that population participates in bringing this country to true greatness.

Make no mistake about this. The current propaganda has been just as lethal to women and children in the US as anything that goes on in any country in Asia or Africa or Latin America. Any man (or woman) who encourages a woman to think that access to contraception, sterilization and abortion will make her equal to men, has rejected her womanhood, and therefore has rejected herself as a real person. Are there injustices against women? Of course. Are their things that need to change? Of course. Do women need support in times of crisis and difficulty? Without question. But is this the best answer we are able to come up with?

In the countries mentioned above, incredible, selfless people, many of them victims themselves, are doing tremendous outreach and helping to change things. They are women (and men) of real courage. They are fighting to bring about real change, raising the standard of women’s lives to what they should be. Some of the answers will need to be rethought. But the positive movement is there. As the documentary says: “Women and girls are part of the solution, not the problem.”

In this country, let us shake off the propaganda daze and stand up. Let us say, “No more” to the lies that drive so much of our culture of death! We are a gift precisely as women. Let’s take back control over our own destinies and rid ourselves of these deceptions so we can stand in the light of the Truth about our dignity and the greatness of our calling, precisely as women, to the whole of humanity. And let’s embrace the men who understand this and respect it and move with us, not against us, in the great crisis of this hour!

For women who have been used and deceived by this present culture, take heart! The good news is that the truth, even when painful, really does set us free. Real change begins in the heart. And women are creatures of the heart. Once we realize the deception that has been foisted upon us, the lies that have been used for our own destruction can be stripped of their power, and the feminine genius can then be unleashed for the building up of a true civilization of life and love.

-Sr. Anne Marie Walsh

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The Wine That Dazes Us

Recently, while speaking with a dear friend, I found myself sharing some of my personal experiences of growing up during the 60’s and 70’s. I lived my grade school, high school and college, during the great movements and turmoil of that time: the civil rights movement with its urban riots, massive and active anti-war, anti-establishment activity especially on the campuses, women’s liberation, changes in the Church with Vatican II and shortly thereafter, the exodus of thousands of Priests and Sisters from their vocations. I vividly recall the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, from the impressionable and uncomprehending perspective of youth. My friend asked me what I thought, out of all that, had had the greatest impact on our culture, our society today. While there is a case to be made for the progress we’ve made in civil rights, and while I believe the Church has been tremendously blessed by Vatican II yet is also still reeling from the effect of the thousands who left their vocations, I responded without hesitation that the sexual revolution, to my mind, has had the greatest impact on where we are today.

Shortly after this conversation, I was praying the Divine Office and was particularly struck by Psalm 60. Psalm 60 speaks about what happens when God’s people are unfaithful. In Vs. 5, it says:

      “You have inflicted hardships on your people
       and made us drink a wine that dazed us.”

But then it says:

      ”You have given those who fear you a sign
       to flee from the enemy’s bow.”

I was moved to ask what is the wine that dazes us? In my prayer, it clearly seemed to me that the wine we tasted in the sexual revolution was the wine of sexual permissiveness. And now we crave this wine. We, as a people, have become addicted to this wine and over these last decades have brewed some very potent varieties of it. Some are so potent that they say one taste (pornography comes to mind), immediately hooks you.

In the space of a relatively short time, we have become like the chronic alcoholic who rationalizes his use and denies the devastation and destruction all around him, because he wants free and unfettered access. Never mind that marriages and families are destroyed, babies aborted, children traumatized and stripped of their innocence. Never mind that violence against women increases, along with every other imaginable form of degradation and perversion. Never mind that disease, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, can be directly traced to the devastating effects of this addiction. We just have to have it. We tell ourselves this makes us free, adult, normal, uninhibited. Exactly what the alcoholic says.

Our denial with regard to what we are drinking, is so strong now, that we are blind to our own enslavement, except when the despair this creates in us sometimes seeps through to the surface. We can no longer help ourselves. And because we do not want to be judged, we try to convince everyone else this is a good thing. “Try it, you’ll like it.” Thus have we exported the wine of our own lewdness to the nations, or as the book of Revelation puts it: the “maddening wine of her adulteries.” (Aren’t we the biggest exporter of pornography in the world?)

This is one addiction that also helps paralyze this country, that makes it passive, indifferent in the face of the grave moral challenges we face. It’s as though people are collectively saying: “As long as you leave me free to do what I want, go ahead and do whatever you want.” That seems to be the thinking of so many. It accounts for the apathy that exists in place of a vigorous defense of justice and right and all that is good, truly good. How can there be moral indignation in a people who are not living moral lives? Could this be why so many people are silent in the face of the gross attacks on human life and dignity that exist in our world today?
Psalm 60 says that God gives those who fear Him a sign to flee from the enemy’s bow. Perhaps one sign can be found in the Wedding Feast of Cana.

Jesus wants to give us a different kind of wine, the wine from this wedding feast. This wine is given to those who are rightly ordered in the gift of their sexuality and who celebrate it in the context in which it was given to us by Our Heavenly Father. This wine, the best wine, fills us with love for life, excitement at the promise it holds, joy in the divine love it expresses. It is a wine which is available to all, and which can be had by following Our Lady’s counsel: “Do whatever He tells you.”

This is the wine the world truly craves, the wine we were created to drink freely. This is the wine that will not enslave but will bring all of us into the true freedom of the sons and daughters of God. May the Most Holy Trinity and Our Lady heal us and bring us to be worthy to receive this wine.

Sr. Anne Marie Walsh, SOLT

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The Spirit of Herod & the Innocence of the Lamb

This December 14, 2012, the spirit of Herod brutally intruded upon our world, upon a people in festive excitement and preparation for Christmas, many anticipating the birth of Our Savior and King. In a little town in Connecticut, at a gradeschool where the approach of Christmas gave the children there special light and anticipation, 20 children and 6 adults trying to protect them, were suddenly and mercilessly mowed down for no discernible reason. Just as the death of the Holy Innocents in Jesus’ time must surely have involved the death of adults as well, mothers and fathers desperate to save the lives of their children, so in Newtown, 6 adults gave their lives to do the same.

Jesus comes into our darkness this Christmas, into a world shocked by its own violence and yet blinded to some of the deepest violences embedded now in its own way of life. A question perennially present once again breaks through the surface into our anguish to demand an answer: Where does this violence come from? Is it situational? Is it cultural? Is there a hereditary predisposition to it? Why does this keep happening?

This problem reveals itself at the beginning of time when Cain first raised his hand and spilled the blood of his own brother. It comes down to a simple premise. What rules our lives! There are only 2 answers here. We choose self-rule or we allow God to order our lives according to His wisdom.

Our first parents chose self-rule and left us the inheritance of that choice: shattered relationships, disharmony, weakness, toil, excessive self-love, the loss of divine gifts, a tendency to be enslaved by sin, the flesh, evil, violence and finally, death.

This is a choice we all make. We choose either self-rule or God’s wisdom, God’s way. This is a choice we must make as a people as well. And our choice will determine our future.

History shows that self-rule is a seed bed for many tragedies. The first to suffer under the tyranny of self-rule? The weakest, most vulnerable and innocent: the unborn, children, the disabled, the elderly, the poor. All those who cannot defend themselves against the lust for self-seeking power that self-rule generates in man’s soul are at risk. (Note: the use of the term self-rule here signifies something different than self-control or self-mastery.)

At the same time, those we marginalize are a reflection of the greatest marginalization of all-God. God is the most marginalized in our world today. We push Him out of public life, our government, our schools, out of our personal lives, and now there is even an attempt to regulate God in the confines of His own House, telling Him He must be subject to the government in His dictates to us. (see HHS mandate)

This is a marginalization that began with the Fall and is perpetuated everytime we choose ourselves over Love. We live in a society that has chosen again and again to proclaim self-rule over God’s wisdom. And this is deadly. Self-rule as a principle for a people, will always degenerate into barbarism, for self-rule, infected as it is by selfishness, rarely is able to exert itself in the discipline of Christian virtue. It is unable because the practice of virtue requires denying oneself for a greater good, a good beyond self.

Jesus shows us how to choose Love as the rule for ourselves this Christmas, even in our deepest darknesses. He shows us how to choose Him by His own example of continually choosing us, no matter the level of depravity we sink to. The witness of the children and teachers slain in Sandy Hook is a witness of this kind of love: innocent love in the children and it’s mature counterpart, self-giving love in the adults. If we want more adults who are self-giving, one thing is for sure, we have to stop destroying the innocence of our children.

This kind of love is the only thing capable of conquering the separation, isolation, selfishness and violence that is born of our narcissistic self-rule. Our hope and our faith reside in the Gift that comes to us this Christmas, that precisely in our deepest darknesses and even though we marginalize Him to the stable, God comes, He still comes to us…in the pure, selfless, innocent love of a Baby Who hides within Himself the glory of the Divinity’s desire to save us, to heal us, to take away our tears, to restore our hearts and to gladden us with His presence.

Mary knows what Her child is destined for; she receives the prophecy of the sword that hangs over her own heart. But She also knows the victory that Her Son, Love Incarnate is destined to win. Her faith holds us fast while in the dangers and evils and violence of the present age, the darkness is surely and definitively being banished away.

We mourn with the families of Newtown, like Rachel mourning her children because they are no more, though we know they are safe now with the Lord. But we know too with firm conviction, and without passing judgment, that the spirit of Herod, Herod whose self-indulgence led him to madness and a worm-eaten end, is vanquished by the love of the innocent Child whose promise of a restored inheritance is ours if we have the wisdom to choose it, an inheritance where: “…the lowly will ever find joy in the Lord…for the tyrant will be no more and the arrogant will have gone; and all who are alert to do evil will be cut off.” Isaiah 29: 19-20

In the Heart of Our Blessed Mother,
Sr. Anne

Understanding the Story of Our Lives – A Lenten Reflection

It is a positive fact that one day all of us will leave the bounds of time and enter into the limitless realms of eternity. The light of heaven will reveal to us things that eye has not seen, ear has not heard, and the mind of man has not conceived.
But while we live in time our lives are probably best characterized by the kind of story they tell, or at least have begun to tell. They can be small stories or great stories, subplots that weave in and out of greater narratives. The beauty of a story is that it develops over time. And while it is yet being written, the plot evolves, characters change, conflicts surface, challenges are faced, good and evil wrestle, heroes are born, villains are conquered and new adventures are begun. Heroes may fall. But even if they fall many times yet rise again to greatness, our hearts thrill just as they do when villains are converted. Until the last chapter is written suspense works in us and hope keeps vigil, while we strain to the greatness we are created to live.

Every person’s life is really a unique story, one which can be read in different ways. A life can be understood in the context of family, or of an even greater history, whether that be a history of the Church or the world, or God’s ongoing relationship with man in creation, salvation and glory.

Jesus’ life has been called: “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” and our life story becomes especially exciting when we begin to see and understand it in the light of Jesus’ own life. Our life then becomes another story of God’s infinite and unwearied love for us. At the same time, God’s love gives to the story of our lives a participation in His own Life, and a special work, a mission we alone can fully accomplish. Part of the adventure of living is discovering our unique mission and playing out our beautiful, and irreplaceable part in the much greater drama of God’s undying love for mankind.

This drama is the Lord’s but it is ours too. It is divine but human too, a mingling of splendid creatures made from ash and mud, living in communion with angels and saints whose respective worlds, heaven and earth, the flesh and the spirit, interpenetrate each other even now.

We are all meant to be unique heroes in this great epic. The saints are true heroes and we are called to this same heroism, a heroism that has as many possible expressions as there are people born into the world, because it can only be lived and expressed in a personal way, in our particular relationship with God.

There is no real narrative thread outside God, nothing with the power to give meaning, to unify and integrate the complexities of the human heart or explain the struggles and yearnings that inhabit the depths of a soul and that steer the course of our history, our story as a people. Man tends toward God by His very nature. And this will always lead him outside himself in a quest to be a part of something greater, something transformative and transcendent. The awakening of a living Faith in our lives draws us into a real adventure with the Triune God, with our loving and provident Father, with Jesus our Savior and Brother, and with the Holy Spirit, our Comforter and Guide. They fill our lives, our stories, with the best of all characters, a Mother like no other, and brothers and sisters who surround us with unending help.

When time shall be no more, this drama of Faith, written in the great voluminous Book of Life, will be read in heaven over and over again to the delight of its citizens. All will have played an important role, whether obvious or hidden, in the grand story that ends in the triumphant victories of Christ and the communion of God with man for all eternity.

Charles Dickens famous story, “David Copperfield” opens with this line: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

Lent is a time to sharpen the focus of our own life narrative. It is a time to take the editor’s pen to the bad ideas, the bad habits, the bad attitudes, the bad writing, that makes us mediocre or worse. It is a time to strengthen the character of the hero that lives in us, and to come into conformity with the life of the greatest Hero ever (Christ), by aligning our lives more closely to His and adopting His Spirit in the vicissitudes of life, whether they be joyful, sorrowful, luminous or glorious. We must always be aware that the course of our story, our life, will in turn affect the course of countless other stories, lives that interface with ours, for better or for worse.

The Book of Revelation gives us a glimpse of the end of time:
“Then I saw a great white throne and Him Who sat upon it; from His presence earth and sky fled away and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done.” Rev. 20: 11:15

May our Lenten exercises during this Year of Faith, become a source of grace for some of the greatest chapters of our lives, masterpieces in their witness to the great mystery of God’s love for mankind.

Sr. Anne Marie Walsh, SOLT
General Sister Servant
1/22/2013
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Sr. Anne Marie Walsh, SOLT, has been a religious for 25 years, and has taught in SOLT schools in the United States and in Italy. She has also served in the formation of seminarians and sisters. She has been involved in Pro-life work and in giving retreats and recollections based on the teachings of the Church, particularly Pope John Paul II’s works: “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women” and the “Theology of the Body.” Sister has currently been serving as the General Sister Servant for the Sisters of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity, for the last ten years. She especially loves working in the “Charism” of Our Lady’s Society with the Priests, Sisters and Laity in the community’s mission in the Church.

SOLT is a Catholic international missionary society based in Corpus Christi, Texas. It is a relatively young community in the Church, founded in 1958 by Father James H. Flanagan, originally from the Archdiocese of Boston.

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