There’s a reason God gives us the Sacrament of Confession through the Church every day of the week. Because we so often need it. And we need to keep using it. Why? Because culture war is a tourniquet. We must go to the source of the problem — ourselves.
By Chris Sparks
“Jesus gave me to understand how a soul should be faithful to prayer despite torments, dryness, and temptations; because oftentimes the realization of God’s great plans depends mainly on such prayer. If we do not persevere in such prayer, we frustrate what the Lord wanted to do through us or within us” (Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, 872).
Why does God ask us to pray?
We Christians make the mistake of focusing on Christ’s promises of prayer’s power, and not spending nearly enough time on His parables that make clear just how persistent, how abiding, and how zealous He is asking for our prayer to be.
Oh, God is surely capable of instantaneous responses to any request. But we have to ask ourselves why does He ask us to pray at all? Why not just act on what He already knows that we need or want?
And the answer to that is that the meaning of life is love, relationship, entering into the divine family of the Trinity and abiding there into eternity.
The greatest thing
In a real relationship, the effort and the gifts don’t go one way. God doesn’t just give everything to us, and we don’t just give worship to Him. As God is sustaining us with His love and redeeming and sanctifying us with His life, so are we offering Him praise and worship, obedience and love in return. And that exchange will never end, though it will change form. The Eucharist is given to us for this world, but when we enter into glory, the Sacraments shall pass away.
So our prayers here on earth are the seeds of the divine life we shall share with the Trinity in Heaven, and in the new creation.
That’s why God cares about prayer — not really for His own sake, but for ours. For us to become the children of God He means us to be, we need to be living like sons and daughters in the Son of God. We need to be living like Jesus. And guess what? That means a lot of regular, sustained, loving prayer.
That’s the secret to the success of the saints.
In whatever state a soul may be, it ought to pray. A soul which is pure and beautiful must pray, or else it will lose its beauty; a soul which is striving after this purity must pray, or else it will never attain it; a soul which is newly converted must pray, or else it will fall again; a sinful soul, plunged in sins, must pray so that it might rise again. There is no soul which is not bound to pray, for every single grace comes to the soul through prayer (Diary, 146).
Sanctity = superhuman
You see, practicing our Catholic faith means living with a foot in both worlds, the natural and the supernatural.
It means faith, hope, and love, most especially when we are in the valley of the shadow of death, the vale of tears, and nobody particularly wants us to be faithful, hopeful, or loving.
It means knowing our home is Heaven, not this fallen earth; that our law is the Gospel, and not strict earthly justice, not vengeance or an eye for an eye, even, but forgiveness, seven times seventy.
It means living impossible lives by the grace of God, knowing that our lives will make no sense from an earthly perspective, knowing that all our secrets ought to be saintly, and all our sins ought to be confessed.
It means embracing good health or ill health, good fortune or bad fortune, worldly success or worldly failure, knowing that all things may be made gracious and profitable for God and neighbor if we unite everything to Christ’s Cross.
It means joy, light, sorrow, and glory, just as the Mysteries of the Rosary map out for us in the lives of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
It means being salt, light, a city set on a hill, good shepherds of wandering sheep.
And not only all that. It means persevering in all of that.
"Let the soul be aware that, in order to pray and persevere in prayer, one must arm oneself with patience and cope bravely with exterior and interior difficulties" (Diary, 147).
"Saint Teresa of Calcutta, whose memory we celebrate today, used to say, 'even if you reap nothing, never tire of sowing'" — Pope Francis, Sept. 5, 2024
Hardest part of all
I don’t know about you, but it’s the persevering part that I find hardest of all.
I mean, I can manage a shocking amount of detachment for a few seconds now and again. It’s really helpful in trying to discern what God is calling me to do. I have some really good days of charity, patience, hope, and love.
But there’s a reason God gives us the Sacrament of Confession through the Church every day of the week. There’s an upper limit for most of us on receiving the Eucharist every day (twice in the context of liturgical celebrations, with one more in case of danger of death), but I am not aware of any law that restricts us on access to Confession.
That’s because we so often need it. And we need to keep using it. Why? Because culture war is a tourniquet. We must go to the source of the problem — ourselves.
Deep roots
If we really want to change the world, we have to be willing to be deeply rooted in our faith, its practice, and in our relationship with God.
We have to be drawing strength from outside of time, from grace, Sacraments, prayer, and eternal things, from God Himself.
And we have to do so in an abiding way, not shaken by the storms of this world.
We are not enough without God. No strategy, no skill, no talent, no great work of human hands will truly convert the culture and the age without the help of Heaven. We have to cooperate with Heaven, not expect to direct it.
This may be a wearying message for those who’ve been faithful through so many storms already. After all, who in their worst expectations could have foreseen the sorts of persecution going on around the world of Christians, the terrible apathy, sloth, or indifference to faith in the formerly Christian lands of the west, or the subtle spiritual combat that’s so pervasive across the last 150 years?
And yet we were warned.
Living in prophesied times
It was foretold in the message of Fatima.
Right now, we live in an era dominated (often subtly) by the errors of Russia, as Our Lady foretold—Communism, yes, and its accompanying materialism, ruthlessness, and totalitarianism.
But also the occultism and predation that characterized the court of the Romanovs in the waning days of the Tsars; Tsarism itself, wherein Church and State are united in the person of the monarch; the anti-semitism of the Russian secret police’s forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the all-too-common disregard for individual dignity, human rights, or personalism that has characterized Russia for centuries, exemplified in the gulags of the Tsars, Soviets, and Putinists; and the general willingness to do “anything in the name of” a lesser good, or even in the name of God — a blasphemous mistake, to do evil in the name of Goodness Himself.
As a result of these errors, many, many people inside and outside of the Church do not have deep roots, and are all too vulnerable to the frost. The great J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the immense world of Middle-Earth, whose story is being told in The Rings of Power series currently streaming on Amazon Prime, gave one of the best poetic images out there of the sort of rootedness in Christ, of real practical faith that we need today:
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
Worldly flash and glitter
We live in an age of cheap imitations, fast food, swift trends rising and falling, instant communication around the world that also fails to really communicate the deep truths.
We live in an age of fortunes made and lost in an instant, of reputations established and torn apart just as quickly, of careers depending on the ability to attract followers on new social media platforms, of the communication of mis- and disinformation.
So instead of being swept along on the tides of the world, let us recommit to the deepest truths of our Catholic faith. Let us frequent the Sacraments, persist in regular prayer (especially the Rosary or the Divine Mercy Chaplet, to which such extraordinary promises are attached), spiritual reading (especially the Gospels, the Catechism, and the Diary of St. Faustina), and one or more of the works of mercy. Let’s dig our roots deep into the most basic, most nourishing parts of our faith, even if (especially if) they are not glamorous.
Pray for me, that I may practice what I preach. I’ll pray for you.
Photo by Samuel Martins on Unsplash.
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