Let nothing disturb thee,
Let nothing affright thee.
All things are passing,
God never changes.
Patient endurance
Attains all things.
Who possesses God
Wants for nothing.
God alone suffices.
St
Teresa of Avila
Reflection
– Yesterday’s post about Therese of Lisieux has put
me in a Carmelite frame of mind, and so I woke up this morning with this prayer
by Teresa of Avila on my mind. It is one I often revert to; I wrote a simple
musical setting for it that we do from time to time here at Mass, and it is a
prayer that has thus slipped into the collective consciousness of our
community.
I have been concerned for some time about
the degree of ‘disturbance’ in people these days. I do not live under a rock; I
do know, quite well, what is happening in the world, and pay close attention to
it, as best one can. There is great violence loose in the world, a spirit of
war, as one of my wise brother priests puts it here.
In the face of great evil—beheadings and
the like—and of all the lesser evils we encounter as a matter of course
(corrupt venal politicians, weak or worldly leaders in the Church, and other
sundry nonsense), the great tendency many of us have is to Get Mad, and in that
to Get Loud.
The Internet has been the great accelerant
of anger and volume in our day, of course. Every one of us who has access to
technology has a giant megaphone with which we can trumpet whatever is coming
out of our hearts and minds. In the past, only the words of the great and
powerful could extend beyond the immediate earshot of the speaker; now, these
very words I am typing will be read by someone in India in less than an hour’s
time (hi, you know who!).
What this means for all of us is a great
responsibility. ‘To whom much has been given, much will be expected.’ If I have
been ‘given’ (in the sense that I certainly didn’t invent it), the ability to
instantly communicate a message to the entire
world, and if I in fact know that by the end of the day a couple hundred
people anyhow will have read my writings, then I have to be very careful in
choosing my words.
Those who have greater readerships, have
greater responsibility yet. And this is where I personally am very
concerned—there is just so much anger, so much vitriol, so much name-calling
and seething contempt out there. And… I’m talking about the ‘Catholic’
blogosphere here, folks.
There is so much anger and hatred and
fierce contempt and violence in the world. Do we really need to pour out from
our hearts our own bile and venom and disdain? How does this serve the cause of
Christ and the life of the Body of Christ, the Church?
‘Let nothing disturb thee, let nothing
affright thee. All things are passing, God never changes. Patient endurance
attains all things. Who possesses God wants for nothing. God alone suffices.’
Surely this is to be the starting point for every Christian engagement in the
world, isn’t it? And out of this, we can find the right words to talk about
Islamic terror, police brutality, the genuinely debased and diseased nature of
politics in our countries, the rampaging agendas that threaten religious and
civil freedoms, and so forth.
We do have to speak about these matters,
and I have, to some degree, done so on this blog. But we have to speak with
mercy, with patience, with respect for those who genuinely disagree with us,
with respect for the basic human dignity and God-created goodness of those who
we believe to be behaving wrongly.
We must never seethe with dripping contempt
and vituperous abuse and insult, name-calling and blackguarding and ranting
against how very, very lousy… everyone else is.
I, Fr. Denis Lemieux, am a sinner. I am
lousy. Who am I to denounce the sin of my brother or sister? But with patient
endurance I wait—we all wait—on the God who never changes, and hope to possess
Him, and so want nothing. And so it must be in the Christian engagement with
evil in the world, or we are just one more angry, violent voice doing nothing
to make anything better, and doing quite a bit to make things a lot worse.
Lots of people can spew anger into the
internet. We who are Christians are the only ones who can proclaim Christ into
the internet. If we don’t, nobody will, and the world will be an angrier,
colder, more polarized and hate-filled place. And we will not have to look far
to know who is responsible for that.
Let nothing disturb thee. Patient endurance
attains all things. God alone suffices.