They that hope in the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall take wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. (Is. 40:31)
Called to Fight
There are many beautiful symbols by which we Catholics are encouraged to picture ourselves in relation to God and His Church. We are as fish happily caught and enclosed in the net of the Gospel; we are as sheep of the One Fold, safe under the benevolent eyes of our Good Shepherd; we are children asleep in the arms of Divine Providence; citizens who have not here a lasting city; we are hunters, harvesters, and wayfarers. But of all these mystical images, none is held so sacrosanct by Holy Mother Church, none brought so often and forcefully to our minds by her constant repetition of it, as this one — we are warriors.
Armed with the sword of the spirit and the shield of faith, protected by the helmet of salvation, and the breastplate of justice, we have been enlisted in the ranks of the Lord of Hosts to fight the good fight in the cause of the Prince of Peace, under the banner of the Queen of the Universe; we are to win for ourselves and as many other souls as possible that coveted crown that has been prepared for us from all eternity. Such is the spiritual life as all the saints would have us envision it. A battle. A glorious battle to cooperate with grace despite the obstacles facing us from without and within, and to become ourselves so imbued with the divine nature that the charity of Christ can flow through us to help, even heal, those suffering around us. What violence should we not be willing to do to ourselves in order that His eyes may console others through ours, His hands support others through ours, and His words inspire others through ours. Unspeakable vocation! To be living, breathing images of Divine Love Incarnate! To “vanquish the enemy,” as St. Maximilian says, “and extend the kingdom of God not by brutal carnage but by deeds of love and mercy”!
Our enemy will stop at nothing to deter us from such a life.
He will distract us, if he can. Yet it is not always easy to distract a devout soul determined to abide by the Commandments of God and of the Church, who thirsts for her own spiritual advancement and is willing to make sacrifices for that of others. No. For us who glory in the office of warrior, the devil’s strategy is much more subtle.
He shows us our weakness. He reminds us of our many, many past failings, and hisses into our hearts the humiliating question, “Who do you think you are — trying to play the hero when you are no better than a coward and a traitor?” Or he presents to us how little all our efforts over the years have accomplished: “If God is not blessing your work, clearly it is because your self-love has spoiled it all.” Finally, he throws constantly before our mind’s eye the incredible odds that we are up against, the evils rampant everywhere in society and even in the Church, and he jeers, “Go ahead. Try and fix them.” And while we are loathe to admit it, his words hit painfully close to home. Because they are true.
Exposing the Devil’s Strategy
Yes, we are weak. Yes, our attempts at winning others over to the Faith have born but pitiful fruit. And, yes, the clearing up of the diabolical disorientation in the world is, to all appearances, a lost cause. Especially nowadays. We often feel, do we not, as St. John Henry Newman did when he said,
I know that all times are perilous, and that in every time serious and anxious minds, alive to the honor of God and the needs of man, are apt to consider no times so perilous as their own. At all times the enemy of souls assaults with fury the Church which is their true Mother, and at least threatens and frightens when he fails in doing mischief. And all times have their special trials which others have not. And so far I will admit that there were certain specific dangers to Christians at certain other times, which do not exist in this time. Doubtless, but still admitting this, still I think that the trials which lie before us are such as would appall and make dizzy even such courageous hearts as St. Athanasius, St. Gregory I, or St. Gregory VII. And they would confess that dark as the prospect of their own day was to them severally, ours has a darkness different in kind from any that has been before it. (Sermon 9, October 2, 1873)
That a saint could so speak in the nineteenth century — and here we are five decades later, arguably tottering on the brink of a divine chastisement — is, for many of us, downright discouraging.
There it is. Discouragement. Our enemy’s weapon of choice, one which he employs with devastating effect against Our Lady’s children in the midst of the current crisis. And if this crippling if-I-cannot-succeed-so-why-try feeling of discouragement is the weapon, surely weariness is the wound inflicted by it.
Weariness — A Crisis of Hope
We are not speaking of a physical weariness, such as may be brought on by a lack of sleep or an over-expenditure of energy or as the aftermath of an illness. Nor do we refer specifically to the mental weariness born of prolonged application of thought or the distastefulness of the subject under consideration. True, these may play their role, but, by and large, theirs is a transient presence. Spiritual weariness, on the other hand, with its sinister lethargy so convenient to the designs of the evil one, is a deeper reality, more difficult to eradicate, which comes upon us like a shadowy, hellish cloud, dulling the bright colors of our interior life, deadening its joyousness, and rendering insipid the sweetness of the Lord that we once tasted and savored with such delight. Spiritual weariness is brought on by suffering, yes, but not exclusively by suffering. We are weary from suffering without hope of reprieve; we are discouraged from fighting with such seemingly scant hope of victory.
Ours is a crisis of hope.
Why is this? Because knowing and trusting are two different things. We know very well that our glory as Catholic warriors is to rely on God’s strength, not ours; to labor in His fields with no thought to the harvest His Providence may or may not bless us with; and to believe in the ultimate victory He has promised us time and time again. We know these things as we know that there is a God and we are loved by Him. We acknowledge on principle the gloriousness of the Cause to which we have committed our lives; and though we may tire of the battle, we know better than to dismiss the battle as a tired thing in itself. “To meditate on the magnificences of God,” Fr. Faber assures us,
can hardly be dull; to fight for our lives with the superior intellect and huge power of a fallen seraph can hardly be tame, whatever else it may be: to be all day receiving new actual graces, realizing new increments of sanctifying grace, listening to numerous and wonderfully diversified inspirations of the Holy Spirit, can hardly be uninteresting; to be changing in grace, and love, and knowledge, nearly every hour, cannot strictly be called uniform; and to be fighting God’s battle even with the most importunate and dishonoring temptations cannot truly be a sickly thing, even though it may be fatiguing. Indeed, from an intellectual point of view it would not be easy to find any thing in the world so thoroughly refreshing, so actively full of changeful vitality, or so briskly interesting, as a spiritual life. It is the healthiest, manliest, completest, divinest thing on earth. Resolve it into its elements of prayer, of light, of love, of heavenly communications, and of the highest operations of a human will, and what more noble, more free, more wide, more magnificent?
Yet this knowledge does not allay our discouragement.
It is the hope we know we ought to have of triumphing in the here and now against our personal faults, our family difficulties, and our social deterioration — this is that goal that seems so far beyond our grasp that we are tempted to give it up altogether. In spite of all the Masses and Holy Communions we have received, still the desolation we are plagued with — the loneliness, the fear for the future or regret for the past, the crippling sense of our own inadequacy — remain. All the Rosaries we have said and the fervent novenas we have offered in the throws of setbacks or misunderstandings or even the obvious injustice of all-out persecutions, seem to have had such little effect. We would not think for one second that God has failed us; but we can scarcely help wondering from time to time why He takes so, so long to come to our rescue.
We know deep down, of course, that our weariness itself is but a temptation — another nasty little goblinlike creature to add to our list of the enemies we are bound to fight with all the ardor that grace has put at our disposal. The question is — how?
The Power of Hope
How does a general rouse the fighting spirit of his troops on the eve of a great battle? He reminds them of their purpose. He recalls to them the strength of their allies, the weakness and wretchedness of their adversary. In a word — he gives them hope. This will be our solution, as well, for, according to Msgr. Jean-Joseph Guame,
When Christian hope is lively, it influences and subjects every power of the soul and body. With the eyes of faith, it looks ever far beyond the narrow horizons of this present life, even on to that which God has prepared for those who love Him. It speaks, but its converse is of Heaven: its heart is on fire, but it burns at the thought of things unseen. It makes use of the body, of its hands and feet, and every member, but solely in the interest of the work of Christ. Having God for its object, it stoops to no lesser thing. All that is not Him, it esteems as nothing, as dust and ashes, as very dung. And yet, not blind, for it makes every means contribute to its One Great End; with the mammon of iniquity, it buys for itself incomparable treasures. If a thing can serve as a help to salvation, well; but if not, hope disdains it and, passing by, pitilessly shatters every obstacle.
That is why we Catholic warriors — men, women, children, priests, religious, the learned and the learning, all of us — need a book like the one the Sisters are even now in the process of publishing through Arouca Press — Spes Nostra: Profound Words of Encouragement and Consolation for Weary Members of the Mystical Body. Coming soon to a bookstore near you!
