You may remember the scene in third Lord of the Rings movie where Frodo is unconscious up in the tower of Cirith Ungol, and orcs who captured him start fighting over his “shiny shirt.” One ugly orc fellow pushes the other ugly fellow, who falls through a conveniently located hole in floor. Ugly Fellow Number One calls down to all ugly fellows on lower level, “The scum tried to knife me — kill him!” So Ugly Fellow Number Two gets orc-piled, and he doesn’t last long. Pretty soon the surrounding orcs hear sounds of fighting, and without having a clue what the fight is for or about, all their orcish instincts flare up, everyone reaches for the nearest sharp or heavy object and starts stabbing or thumping the body of whoever happens to be closest, so that by the time Samwise shows up to rescue Frodo, “Dead orcs were lying all about the passage, and some were piled in heaps. Others had been thrown from the narrow upper windows. Nearly all were dead by some savage blade. The place stank of blood.” This was nice for Sam, of course, but for viewers like us — it is a bit disturbing. What a perfect picture of hell. All frenzy and no focus. Just pure awfulness.
Now, not very many of us are malicious enough to qualify for full-blown orc status. But we are selfish. When we want something, even if that something is not exactly a shiny mithril shirt, we do not always mind causing grief to those about us in our efforts to get it. We are oversensitive. We often take offense where none is intended or charge mindlessly into a fray with our own allies. Or, on a less sinister level, we often go about our daily duties with no real appreciation for why we are doing them. This is not just unfortunate — it is unCatholic.
Let’s not be orcs. As sons of our Heavenly Father, let us want what He wants; as disciples of our Crucified Savior, let us take our sufferings in stride, bearing our little crosses manfully. And, finally — and this is the point I want to focus on for the duration of this article — as soldiers in the Church Militant, let us know what our Mission is and love it.
On Micro-Missions and Macro-Missions
Every single person who has ever lived has had a mission. God does not create a man without a mission — and by “mission” I mean the specific, unique role that that individual has been given to play in time from all eternity. We are on earth to glorify God, true. You might say that is the “why” of our existence. Our mission, then, is the “how” of our existence. Every one of us has a mission from God. Tragically, most of humanity neither knows nor cares what that mission is. As Catholics we do not have the luxury of such blissful ignorance. We are soldiers, and, as we just saw, soldiers fighting without a purpose or a cause are not really soldiers — they are orcs.
At this point, though, we should make an important distinction. We should distinguish between our “macro-Mission” (capital m, singular) and our “micro-missions” (lowercase m, plural). Both are important.
A soldier who dies in his sleep during an enemy air raid is no less valiant for having been asleep. Just because he wasn’t out charging enemy, crawling over land mines, or pole-vaulting over barbwire fences, does not mean he was not fulfilling the wishes of his superiors. On the contrary! Such a one was successfully completing a “micro-mission.” A micro-mission, or “mini mission,” is anything God wishes us to accomplish. It is God’s will small scale. St. Joseph building this particular table in his carpenter shop, for instance, was fulfilling a micro-mission in the context of his larger macro-Mission to be foster father of Jesus Christ.
Do not think that just because micro-missions are small, they are also easy. St. Marie of the Incarnation stepping over the body of her twelve-year-old son Claude, who had thrown himself across threshold of the Ursuline convent, crying hysterically and begging his mother not to become a nun — was also fulfilling a micro-mission. It was anything but easy. Had she failed to fulfill it, though, she never would have succeeded in her macro-Mission to become the foundress of Ursulines in New World.
While some micro-Missions can be excruciatingly painful, most are not. A loving housewife making sure dinner is ready and hot for her husband when he gets home from work — that, too, is a micro-mission.
Our Mission to Love
Now you might think, “Well, that’s nice, only, how do micro-missions like folding the laundry, mowing the lawn, going to work, and walking the dog have anything to do with me not being an orc?” The obvious answer is purpose. Orcs do not particularly care why they are doing what they do. Like evil automatons, they just do. But dig a bit deeper, and we see that the essential difference is love. Our purpose — our macro-Mission — as Catholics is to love. That is, to love God, our neighbor, and our enemy. We must even love ourselves in the sense that we desire for ourselves the greatest good which is Heaven. “At the evening of this life, we will be judged on love,” says St. John of the Cross. Love. Not a word in orc vocabulary.
Sweet as its connotation may be, love is not always easy, any more than those micro-mission daily duties are. Yet, Fr. Lorenzo Sales, spiritual director of the Capuchin mystic, Ven. Consolata Betrone, insists, “We have to love our duties if we are to perform them properly.” The question is — how?
The Secret to Fulfilling Our Mission
Mary. That might sound like a jump in logic, but remember, Our Lady’s macro-Mission wasn’t just to be Mother of the historical, physical Christ. Her Mission was and is to be Mother of the whole Church, Head and members. Her on-going, ever-present mission — as St. Peter Julian Eymard says — is to form Jesus Christ in us. Which means that hands-down the greatest fight, greatest and most vital macro-Mission of our lives is to let Her.
Let me say that again. Our Mission is to be Jesus Christ in this world: walking, talking incarnations of Divine Love, and the only way to accomplish that is through Her. Her Mission is to help us fulfill our Mission, and our Mission is to allow Her fulfill Her Mission. If we but cooperate with grace, She will turn us so completely into Christ, that when Heavenly Father looks down on us, He does so with the same complacency He took in beholding Christ on the banks of the Jordan River in Palestine: “This is My Beloved Son.” And when the world looks at us, it does so with the same loathing and detestation as it had when it looked at Him.
Mary is the secret to helping us keep our focus on the whole purpose of our existence, our Macro-Mission to be, as St. Augustine says, “Not just Christians, but Christ!” Union with Mary, the Mother of Fair Love, is the secret to victory over our selfish instincts and their horrible power to hurt those around us. Mary is, in a word, our best bet for how not to be orcs.
