We would do well to adopt St. Joan of Arc’s famous battle cry as our own: “I am not afraid! I was born to do this!”
We may not have to worry about donning our armour and riding into physical battle, but there is certainly a spiritual war waging and we are all in the middle of it.
Now is the moment for which we were created. God formed each one of us, painstakingly, in our mothers’ wombs and crafted our “innermost being” with these days in mind. The extent to which we believe this is the extent to which we will shine as “lights in the world in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation” (Phil 2:15).
In his famous novel The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky writes, “For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it still follow the Christian ideal. And neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.”
All human systems of both justice and compassion crave the dignity, beauty, and order of Christ but desire to do so without Christianity, sometimes without religion of any sort. What remains is a soulless counterfeit, a cadaver without a beating heart.
Once God is ousted in favour of a humanist worldview, there is no bottom. When a society divorces itself from God’s laws, there is no limit to the atrocities that are to come – all of them, of course, in the name of progress, equality, safety, and even love. Any number of virtuous spins can be applied to wars waged against God’s design for humanity. We are seeing this now.
In his rules for the discernment of spirits, St. Ignatius, the Spaniard who founded the Jesuit order, writes about how the enemy of our soul works by sowing dissension and discord. The focus is taken away from the worship of God and his goodness and instead placed upon nitpicking events, people, and situations we cannot possibly understand fully from our vantage point. The obsession over and assessment of the morality of others becomes all-consuming to the point of absolute chaos.
No one is given respite from the parade of polarized arguments. Even as Canadians, we feel some unexplainable urge to align ourselves with American political platforms. The dissension is thick, and the sludge of defamation and casual character assassination is daily bread for most of us.
The only way to keep our heads up is to remember that we, like St. Joan of Arc, were born for these times. Not only will we make it through, but some of us will become holy and, God willing, even saints because of the very times we struggle to accept.
The following lines are excerpts from the journal of Raissa Maritain in the year 1914. Raissa was a Russian poet and author and also the wife of Jacques Maritain, arguably the most prominent Catholic philosopher of the 20th century.
“The horrible war that is raging with its accompanying hatreds and atrocious miseries, would make this earth hateful if one did not know in some way all is well because there is divine will and permission. There remains nothing for us but to ask more than ever for the perfecting of our souls, so that by aspiring to nothing but Heaven, they too may be worthy to be admitted there the day God wills!”
The first psalm gives us a foolproof recipe for righteousness, “Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.”
Blessed is the servant whose master finds him so doing when he returns (Mt 24:46).
